VOLUME 25 NO.1 SPRING 2022 $20.

00

THE SOIL and the WORKER

CONTRIBUCIÓN DE LOS CAMPESINOS Y CAMPESINAS • AGROECOLOGY, FROM PALESTINE TO THE DIASPORA • THE PERENNIAL SEEDS OF ZAPATA • SPRINGTIME FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
THE NEW “GREEN REVOLUTION” FOR AFRICA • NATIONAL LIBERATION AND SOVEREIGN TECHNOLOGY: CONTRIBUTION OF SLAHEDDINE EL-AMAMI • HEADING FOR THE LAST ROUNDUP
The capitalist transformation of the process
of production also appears as a martyrology
for the producer; the instrument of labor
appears as a means of enslaving, exploiting
and impoverishing the worker; the social
combination of labor process appears as
an organized suppression of his individual
vitality, freedom and autonomy.
… All progress in capitalist agricul­ture is a
progress in the art, not only of robbing the
worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress
in increasing the fertility of the soil for a
given time is progress towards ruining the
more long-lasting sources of that fertility.
… Capitalist production, therefore, only
develops the technique and the degree
of combination of the social process of
production by simultaneously undermining
the original sources of all wealth—
the soil and the worker.
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One
 Editorial Collective
Acquisitions Editor
Erik Wallenberg
is dedicated to building social movements and
political struggles around radical perspectives on Editors at Large
Aditi Bansal
science and society. We are workers, educators, and Edward Millar
students in STEM and related fields committed to Lizzy Karnaukh
Manu Raghavan
the democratic practice of science for the benefit of
humanity and the planet. Review & Editing
Amanda I. Rodríguez-Leon
Anne-Laure White
Azucena Lucatero
Science for the People was originally Elected Officers Chhavi Goenka
published from 1969 to 1989. You can Clara Qin
support our return to publishing at Managing Editor Alexandra Adams Cliff Conner
patreon.com/sftporg or subscribe at Publisher Calvin Wu Emily Alex
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/ Secretary Camille Rullán Jake Ogata Bernstein
subscribe. Treasurer Erik Hetzner Jennifer Nicklay
LM White
Current and past issues, archives of Mark Colasurdo
the original publication, and more new Michael Gasser
writing can be read online at magazine. Nadine Fattaleh
scienceforthepeople.org. For more Noah Mills
information on Science for the People’s Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar
chapters and working groups, visit Pia-Kelsey O'Neill
scienceforthepeople.org. Trude Bennett
Vassiki Chauhan

Technical & Copy Editing

Science for the People is published in Francesca Finocchiaro
the United States by People’s Science Lydia Ross
Network, PO Box 3817, Knoxville, Marco Baity Jesi
Tennessee, 37927. Sara Gutiérrez
T. A. Tran
EIN: 83-2438149
ISSN: Translation
0048-9662 (print) David Costalago Meruelo
2642-5947 (online) Esther Sánchez García
Artwork and Design Joel-Javier Jenkins
Printed by Hemlock Printers, Canada. Mostafa Shagar
Spot Illustrations Nizar Ezroura
Matteo Farinella with the SftP Translation Working Group

Cover Artwork
Connie Resch

Designer
Amy Saidens

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 1

in this issue

3 29 58
Letter from the editors Earthy Knowledge: Rethinking Fear of A Black Planet:
Chinese Terracing Campaigns Archival Notes
Sigrid Schmalzer Justin Davis

7
Sumud and Sovereignty 34 62
Trude Bennett
National Liberation and Sovereign Organizing Reports
Technology: The Contribution of
Slaheddine el-Amami SftP Canada
12 Max Ajl
Archive Digitization Working Group
Agroecology, from Palestine to
the Diaspora
40
63 66 69 73 76
Nadine Fattaleh and Adam Albarghouthi

The Perennial Seeds of Zapata

Simon Tye and Eric Hagen Reviews

19 Ants Against the Grasshopper

Debt and the Transition to
Regenerative Agriculture 45
Isaac Bissell
Contribución de los campesinos y
campesinas: Caso Venezuelas
SMiguel Angel Núñez
Nadine Fattaleh and Calvin Wu
Cooperatives Against Capitalism
and White Supremacy: Routes to
Black Freedom
Erik Wallenberg

23 Springtime for Food Sovereignty

Mostafa Shagar and Nadine Fattaleh
The New “Green Revolution” for
Africa—A Revolution for Farmers, 51 Stories of Struggle and Strife
or for Corporate Profits? Vassiki Chauhan
Ashley Fent
Heading for the Last Roundup
Edward Millar and Cliff Conner
How to Build a Utopia
Nafis Hasan

2 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Letter from the editors
Amongst the highly placed
It is considered low to talk about food.
The fact is: they have
Already eaten.
—Bertolt Brecht (1944)
To talk about food is to face with sober senses our real
conditions of life. Everyone needs to eat; yet, some savor the
extravagant, some struggle to put food on the table, while
others starve. Consider the fact that 10 percent of the world’s
population is undernourished in a time when 14 percent of
food produced worldwide is burnt or buried in landfills.1
To talk about food is to face with sober senses our relations
with our fellow humans. No, we are not asking everyone to
“thank a farmer” for a meal. Instead, think deeper: consider
the fact that half of the world’s population are small farmers
and landless peasants earning at or below subsistence
income, and these same people produce 70 percent of the
world's food. 2
To talk about food is to compel ourselves to think about
material wealth and its creation. A bountiful harvest, the
cornucopia, symbolizes prosperity, not in monetary terms,
but in feeding the people. Food is grown from the earth,
tended by the planter’s hand. In this way, Marx named the
original sources of all wealth: the soil and the worker.
To talk about wealth is to lay in contrast the reality of our
current conjuncture. Capitalism has remade farming into
agriculture, transforming a fundamentally productive process,
in which farmers work with autochthonous biological inputs,
into a commodified system dependent on external suppliers
of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, seeds, machinery, fossil
fuels, and hired labor. 3 A crude reductionist mindset replaces
mosaic land patterns characterized by crop rotation, crop
diversity, the recycling of nutrients, and the nurturing of soil
microflora, invertebrates, and pollinators, with monoculture
cash crops malnourished by commercial nutrient inputs.4
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
This insight is central to Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift:
just as the factory system under capitalism robs the worker of
their energy, so the agricultural system under capitalism robs
the soil of its vitality, without possibilities of replenishing and
regenerating future prosperity. 5
As for the fates of the people, the capitalist transformation
makes necessary the enclosure of ever larger areas of
land, dispossessing people all over the world of their
livelihood. Where profitable crops are produced, they
become industrialized workers subjected to the alien force
of capital, and wherever unworthy of market speculation,
they are left to their own devices to struggle to grow food
for their communities in a rapidly worsening climate. Profit
accumulation on the one pole, thus, requires exacerbation
of hunger, war, and deprivation on the other.
Not for the first time we invite
readers to talk about food. We
published a special issue in 1979
that ruminated on some of the
same issues raised here.6 Some
discussions are a continuation—
pesticides, agribusiness, and
corporate monopolies; others a
transposition—plight of American
dairy farmers, lessons from
revolutionary China. Saliently, the
accelerating globalization since the late 1970s obliges us
today to put a stronger focus on the global South—where
most agricultural workers of the world live and toil.
And we must not only talk. Within these pages, we witness
concrete actions people are taking against the capitalist food
and agricultural system: defiance against settler-colonization,
sovereignty in the face of imperialist aggression, the search
for freedom from racism and patriarchy, and application
of agroecology for ecological restoration and resilience
to climate change. No more do we seek to uplift these
revolutionary voices than to actively expand the people-
power needed in these struggles. So, please connect with us
and join in the (food) fights!
In struggle,
Volume 25, Number 1 Editorial Collective
notes on page 27
3
Meet the Contributors to THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Adam Albarghouthi
Adam is a software engineer and a
member of the Palestinian Social Fund,
a volunteer-based organization that
backs the research, development, and
growth of Palestinian cooperative farms.
Ashley Fent, PhD
Ashley is a researcher with extensive
experience in rural West Africa.
She works with Community Alliance
for Global Justice, a Seattle-based
nonprofit that participates in the global
food sovereignty movement.
@agrawatch @cagjseattle
Calvin Wu
Calvin is an auditory neuroscientist
at the University of Michigan and the
publisher of Science for the People.
Cliff Conner
Cliff is a historian of science. He is
the author of The Tragedy of American
Science (Haymarket Books, 2020) and
A People’s History of Science (Bold Type
Books, 2005).
Connie Resch, BSc
Connie is a Canadian-born artist with
a background in microbiology and
biochemistry. She moved to the United
States in 2015 and began her career
in art shortly after. Her curiosity for
details in the natural world inspires the
art she creates. She prefers traditional
media and tends to work with it as
often as possible. @ConnieResch
4 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Dan Nott
Dan is a cartoonist, illustrator, and
educator living in Vermont. His
forthcoming nonfiction graphic novel,
Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity,
the Internet, and the Secrets Behind
the Systems We Use Every Day, will be
released by Random House Graphic
in Spring 2023. @dan_nott
Edward Millar
Edward is a PhD student in
Environmental Applied Science and
Management and Sociology instructor
at Toronto Metropolitan University.
He is a member of SftP Canada.
Eric Hagen
Eric is a PhD student in Biological
Sciences at the University of Arkansas.
He studies plant evolution, mainly
focusing on how plant diversity has
been shaped by chromosome changes.
@EricHagen19
Erik Wallenberg
Erik is a PhD candidate in the History
Program at CUNY Graduate Center.
His research is focused on the portrayal
of environmental crises, politics, and
science in activist theater. He has taught
classes in environmental history, global
history, and environmental justice at
Brooklyn College and the University of
Vermont and is the acquisitions editor
of Science for the People.
Haitham Haddad
Haitham is an illustrator and graphic
designer from Haifa, Palestine. His
work centers on image and print-making
as political tools to disturb the status
quo, using punk, queer, and Levantine
aesthetics.
Meet the Contributors to THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Isaac Bissell
Isaac is a resident of South Burlington,
Vermont. He worked with the Vermont
Land Trust on over 130 conservation
projects, many of which related
to the conservation of conventional
dairy farms.
Isabel Holtan
Isabel is studying biomedical
engineering and does art on the side
to keep herself sane. She specializes in
paintings of nature and animals, but is
always happy to add a spooky twist to
her work. She enjoys painting with oils
and watercolor, and recently has been
branching out into digital art.
Jordan Collver, MSc
Jordan is a UK-based illustrator and
science communicator specializing in
using the visual and narrative power of
comics to explore themes of science,
nature, and belief. His work has been
featured in The Journal of Science
Communication, The London Natural
History Museum, BBC Science Focus,
Physics World, Politico, Slate, Nautilus,
The Nib, Skeptical Inquirer, and several
comic anthologies. @JordanCollver
Justin Davis
Justin is a writer and labor organizer.
You can find his poems in places like
Anomaly, wildness, Up the Staircase
Quarterly, Apogee Journal, and Glass:
A Journal of Poetry. You can find his
essays in Labor Notes. He lives in
Memphis, Tennessee. @AnkhDeLillo
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Max Ajl
Max is a postdoctoral fellow at
Wageningen University and an
associated researcher with the Tunisian
Observatory for Food Sovereignty and
the Environment. He is an associate
editor at Agrarian South and his recent
book is A People's Green New Deal
(Pluto Press, 2021). @maxajl
Miguel Ángel Núñez, MSc
Venezolano, agroecólogo, escritor,
docente e investigador en varias
universidades nacionales. Desde 1985
está vinculado a los movimientos
sociales, siendo co-fundador del
Instituto para la Producción e
Investigación para la Agricultura
Tropical IPIAT-Venezuela y del
Movimiento Agroecológico de
Latinoamérica y del Caribe, MAELA.
Fue asesor del Despacho del Presidente
Hugo Chavéz, por el período 2004-
2007 y de varios Ministros del Gobierno
en mención. Actualmente asesor de
la Ministra de Ciencia y Tecnología.
@17MiguelAngel
Myles Marshall
Myles is a biochemistry technician
and the founder of Secret Molecule, a
graphic design and animation studio for
biochemistry researchers, journalists,
and educators.
Mostafa Shagar
Mostafa is a graduate student from
Egypt, currently based in Canada.
He is currently pursuing a PhD in
semiconductor physics with a focus
on optics and material science. He
is interested in using science and
technology studies to better understand
science from a global perspective. He
is also active in the Canada chapter of
SftP. @ShagarMostafa
5
Meet the Contributors to THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Nadine Fattaleh
Nadine is a Palestinian researcher and
writer from Amman, currently based in
the Hudson Valley area. Her interests
include food, films, and photos.
Nafis Hasan
Nafis received his PhD in 2019 from
Tufts University in Cell, Molecular &
Developmental Biology. He currently
works in the labor movement and is an
Associate Faculty member at Brooklyn
Institute for Social Research. He is also
a climate organizer with the Democratic
Socialists of America and an editor at
Science for the People and Jamhoor.
Sigrid Schmalzer
Sigrid is professor of history at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst.
A founding member of Western
Mass SftP and of the Critical China
Scholars, she is also a Vice President
in her faculty union. In addition to
many academic works on the history
of science in the People’s Republic
of China, she has published a picture
book for children titled, Moth and
Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering
Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for
Sustainable Agriculture.
Simon Tye
Simon is a PhD candidate in Biological
Sciences and NSF Graduate Research
Fellow at the University of Arkansas.
His current research focuses on the
ecological and evolutionary implications
of mass mortality events—sudden die-
offs that may be increasing in frequency
and magnitude due to global change.
www.simontye.com
6 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Sai Kwok
Sai, also known as “A better hell,”
is a London-based artist who has
developed a unique, eye-catching, and
memorable illustration style through
a constantly evolving approach. She
enjoys translating the ordinary into the
whimsical through acts of spontaneous
imagination. Her daily sketch or doodle
is her favorite time of the day.
@abetterhell
Sophie Standing
Sophie is an illustrator and designer with
a passion for improving communication
and understanding through illustration.
IG: @sophiestanding
Trude Bennett, DrPH
Trude lives in Durham, North Carolina.
She is retired from teaching Maternal
and Child Health at UNC Chapel
Hill School of Public Health, where
she focused on social inequalities in
maternal health and wartime health
legacies of Agent Orange/dioxin in
Vietnam. She is a member of the
Steering Committee of Jewish Voice for
Peace Health Advisory Council and the
board of Pro-Choice North Carolina.
Vassiki Chauhan
Vassiki is a postdoctoral fellow at
Barnard College, Columbia University,
working on how the human visual
system responds to words.

SUMUD AND SOVEREIGNTY
Interview with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees
I
n a research report of nearly
three hundred pages released in
February 2022, “Israel’s Apartheid
Against Palestinians: Cruel
System of Domination and Crime
Against Humanity,” Amnesty
International (AI) denounces the
systematic way in which Israeli
“Laws, policies, and institutional
practices all work to expel, fragment,
and dispossess Palestinians of their
land and property….”¹ Though failing
to condemn the Israeli occupation or
distinguish between Israeli violence
and Palestinian resistance, AI has
become the most recent human
rights group, after Human Rights
Watch and B’Tselem,² to recognize
the apartheid nature of Israeli
policy towards Palestinians, a claim
articulated by Palestinian human
rights groups like Al-Haq, Adalah
and Al Mezan, and embedded in
the Palestinian civil society call for
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions in
2005.³
TRUDE BENNETT
Amnesty International specifies that
it is describing actions of the Israeli
government and condemns any
attacks on “Judaism or the Jewish
people.” Nonetheless, immediate
accusations of antisemitism by
Israeli officials and their supporters
served to obscure the relationship
between two landmark events: the
acknowledgment of an apartheid
system discriminating against
Palestinians by the world’s largest
human rights organization, and
the October 22, 2021 banning by
the Israeli Ministry of Defense of
six longstanding and respected
groups defending Palestinian human
rights. The outlawed Palestinian
nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), ranging in their missions
from prisoner support to women’s
empowerment, are Addameer
Prisoner Support and Human Rights
Association, Al-Haq, Bisan Center
for Research and Development,
Defense for Children International–
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
PHOTO BY UAWC
Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work
Committees, and Union of Palestinian
Women’s Committees.
One of the six NGOs, the Union
of Agricultural Work Committees
(UAWC), is the leading proponent of
food sovereignty for Palestinians.
A member organization of the
global peasants’ movement La
Via Campesina (LVC), UAWC has
won prestigious international
awards for its work against poverty
and promotion of sustainable
development. Representatives of
the Union of Agricultural Work
Committees responded to questions
from SftP Editorial Collective member
Trude Bennett in a written interview.
TB: Could you give a brief history of
UAWC, explaining your goals and
objectives?
UAWC: The Union of Agricultural
Work Committees is a civil,
7
independent, and non-profit
Palestinian organization. It was
established in 1986 following an
initiative by a group of agricultural
engineers, farmers, and volunteers,
both males and females. Our
priorities are essentially focused on
social and economic empowerment
of Palestinian farmers in order
to reinforce their steadfastness
(sumud) on the land and to achieve
food sovereignty. In addition, we
work to empower the Palestinian
farmers through the innovation
of developmental and sustainable
agricultural initiatives. Moreover,
we contribute to protecting the
land and providing legal support to
farmers in cases of land confiscation
orders. Finally, we endeavor to
advance the agricultural sector
through developing national
policies to support farmers’ rights.
As an organization that has been
working for over thirty years,
we are considered to be one of
the biggest and most important
agricultural organizations in the
West Bank and Gaza. Recognition
for our achievements throughout
the years include the Equator Prize
of the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP), the US Food
Sovereignty Alliance Prize, the
Arab Thought Foundation Award
in Economic Creativity, and most
recently, the Energy Globe Award for
Sustainability.
TB: Would you say that agroecology
is your leading philosophy?
UAWC: Yes, agroecology is a concept
that has been a center of attention
lately more than ever thanks to
the continuous awareness raised
amongst the people. We have been
implementing this concept as
part of its strategic approach since
the beginning, linking it to the
sustainability goal and the ultimate
aim of achieving food sovereignty.
The organization prioritizes
traditional knowledge; one means is
8 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
the preservation of indigenous seeds water are the pillars of Palestinian
and protecting them through the food sovereignty. About ten thousand
Local Seed Bank project. years ago, the first agricultural
experiments appeared in the
TB: What is your definition of food Jericho Oasis. The first to reach this
sovereignty, and how does it relate to deserted oasis and to settle the area
political sovereignty? near the spring, was a people who
knew how to harvest wheat, even if
UAWC: We adopted the definition they did not know how to plant it.
of LVC for the concept of food We know this because they made
sovereignty, taking into account the tools for harvesting wild wheat,
Palestinian context under Israeli which is a fine example of their far-
colonialism. Political sovereignty sightedness. They made sickles out
leads to food sovereignty. In of flint, which survived to be found
the Palestinian context, Israeli by John Garstang while excavating
colonization controls all natural there in the 1930s. The blade of the
resources that are the basic blocks old sickle was a piece of deer horn
in building food sovereignty. The or bone. Modern archaeological and
indigenous seeds, the land, and the botanical evidence indicates that
What is Food Sovereignty?
Food sovereignty is the peoples’, Countries’ or State Unions’ RIGHT to
define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis
third countries. Food sovereignty includes:
● prioritizing local agricultural production in order to feed the
people, access of peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds,
and credit. Hence the need for land reforms, for fighting against
GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), for free access to seeds,
and for safeguarding water as a public good to be sustainably
distributed.
● the right of farmers, peasants to produce food and the right of
consumers to be able to decide what they consume, and how and
by whom it is produced.
● the right of Countries to protect themselves from too low priced
agricultural and food imports.
● agricultural prices linked to production costs: they can be achieved
if the Countries or Unions of States are entitled to impose taxes on
excessively cheap imports, if they commit themselves in favor of a
sustainable farm production, and if they control production on the
inner market so as to avoid structural surpluses.
● the populations taking part in the agricultural policy choices.
● the recognition of women farmers’ rights, who play a major role in
agricultural production and in food.
—La Via Campesina (viacampesina.org)
the cultivation of wheat and barley
began in Palestine. This is what was
called the “Natufian civilization,”
which was named after Wadi al-Natuf
northwest of Jerusalem; it lasted
about six thousand years, starting
around 12,000 BCE.4
TB: Do you work in all the occupied
territories? How large is your staff,
and where are they located?
UAWC: We work in the West Bank
and Gaza as main branches, with
several sub-branches that cover the
entire geographic area. For example,
in the West Bank, we have three
offices located in Ramallah, Nablus,
and Hebron, with close to fifty
employees.
TB: How does membership in LVC
benefit UAWC or affect your work?
What is unique about your situation
compared with other peasant
organizations in La Via Campesina?
UAWC: With membership in LVC,
we moved the cause of farmers,
fishermen, and rural women from
the local and national levels to the
Arab and regional levels, and also
worked to internationalize the
farmers' cause to defend it in all
international forums. As coordinator
of LVC in the Arab region, we are an
essential pillar for the dissemination
of the concepts of food sovereignty
and agroecology at the local and Arab
regional levels. We have mobilized
international solidarity with the
Palestinians in general and the
peasants in particular. Peasants,
fishermen, and rural women suffer
from oppression and discrimination,
as well as monopolization and
control of their resources and
production inputs. In addition to all
these conditions, the Palestinians
are currently languishing under a
racist regime that occupies the land,
confiscates property, kills farmers,
arrests fishermen, and destroys
agricultural facilities owned by rural
women. The Israeli occupation adds
difficulty to the continuity of the
dignified life that all human beings
desire.
TB: Could you describe your seed
bank project and its significance?
UAWC: Our Local Seed Bank was
established in 2010 and targeted
small-scale farmers, helping them
reach seed sovereignty as the first
step in achieving food sovereignty.
Over the last twelve years, our local
seed bank achieved the following:
∙ Preserved more than 52 local
species, belonging to 12 plant
families (most of them basic
vegetable crops for Palestinian
families)
∙ Reproduced the local seeds in
safe amounts for 20 crops
∙ Contributed to farmers gaining
sovereignty over seeds.
- Total number of beneficiaries:
6,635 families
- Total planted area:
1,270 hectares [3,138 acres]
of new green cover
∙ Established Local Seed Bank as
an educational center
∙ Total number of students,
women, and farmers receiving
training in the Local Seed Bank
units: 2,167
∙ Supported 30 master’s students in
their theses related to local seeds
TB: What are the health
consequences of land loss, food
insecurity, high unemployment,
and coercion to provide low wage
and dangerous labor in Israel for the
settlements, as well as the intense
stress of living under occupation?
What are the main physical and
mental health problems you observe
in people of different ages?
UAWC: For years, the Palestinian
people have been suffering from
two types of trauma resulting from
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
the circumstances surrounding
continuous policies of aggression:
First type: This trauma has been
ongoing since 1948 from the
systematic, constant aggression that
targets the life of the Palestinian
person, represented by killing,
physical abuse, torture, psychological
abuse, and imprisonment. This
aggression targets both the
individual and collective self, as
well as Palestinian property and
opportunities to make a decent
livelihood from agricultural and
commercial sources, through the
policy of demolition, sabotage,
confiscation of lands, and uprooting
of trees.
Second type: This form of trauma is
linked to the shock resulting from
the construction of the separation
wall, the imposition of complete
isolation, and the siege of hundreds
of Palestinians inside what is
described in the global political
literature as a “ghetto” (or state of
isolation).
TB: What are the main obstacles and
challenges you face in your work?
UAWC: Working in Area C,5 which
is the mission of UAWC, has been a
challenge since the beginning due
to the inhumane situation there
and the attacks by settlers and
occupation forces. However, the
recent Israeli incitement attacks and
campaigns have to be the biggest
challenge that we have faced and are
currently facing. These attacks aim to
criminalize our civil society work in
an effort to stop donors from funding
UAWC and stop its projects in Area C.
Although these allegations have been
proven several times to be baseless,
the international community’s
position on standing up for UAWC
and the other five organizations
being attacked remains very limited
and timid.
9
TB: Has UAWC suffered harassment
from the Israeli government in the
past?
UAWC: We have been a target of Israeli
settler organizations that are well
UAWC: We have been a target of
Israeli settler organizations that connected to the Israeli government
for the last ten years. On-site actions
are well connected to the Israeli
government for the last ten years.
On-site actions have included
disruption of project implementation
have included disruption of project
and harassment of staff. But this is
the first time that the harassment
implementation and harassment of
has reached a much larger scale by staff. But this is the first time that the
labeling a human rights defender
organization as a “terrorist harassment has reached a much larger
scale by labeling a human rights defender
organization.”

TB: What was the purpose or intent

of Israel’s October 2021 designation
of UAWC and five other Palestinian
human rights organizations as so-
called “terrorist organizations”?6
UAWC: The purpose is clear. Israel
targeted the six largest and most
quoted civil society organizations
in Palestine. The one thing these
organizations have in common
is that they work in the field
of human rights to expose the
atrocities of Israeli occupation and
settler practices on our land. As the
organizations have grown larger,
they now hold great influence in the
international arena as well-respected
and professional organizations
wholly dedicated to their goals.
This is something that the Israeli
government fears and cannot let
pass. For example, just seeing the
great achievements accomplished
by UAWC in Area C that worked
to protect these lands from
confiscation, or Al-Haq’s efforts in the
International Criminal Court (ICC)
to investigate Israeli crimes—these
are adequate reasons to make the
Israeli government shut down these
organizations. The most convenient
way would be the terrorist labeling
in hopes of rousing fear and scaring
off international donors to stop
their support and funds to the
organization as a “terrorist organization.”
organizations, ultimately paralyzing
their work.
TB: What has been the impact of
the designation on your work, e.g.,
effect on donors, banking or legal
problems?
UAWC: The designation decision has
had a negative impact on our work.
It frightened a number of our donors
and consequently they decided to
postpone work and payments until
consultations were conducted with
their legal authorities. The aim
behind the designation is to frighten
the donors and employees of the
organizations and thus undermine
the work of the organizations,
which frankly has contributed to
weakening the organizations’ ability
to reach their target communities.
The decision also encouraged Israeli
right-wing institutions such as NGO
Monitor and UK Lawyers for Israel
(UKLFI) to increase their pressure on
Palestinian civil society organizations
and the six organizations in
particular.
In the case of UAWC, the decision
deprives about twenty thousand
Palestinian farmers of direct and
other support. The decision also aids
in preparing for the annexation of
Area C, which is being implemented
on the ground at an accelerating
pace. By undermining the work of
the six organizations, the decision
paves the way for the process of
expelling Palestinians from Area C
and building more settlements. The
decision doubled the pressure on the
work teams, which are already under
great pressure due to the nature of
their work in areas threatened with
confiscation and close to army camps
in Area C.
TB: What are the implications of this
attack for human rights groups in
other countries?
UAWC: The decision contradicts all
principles of democracy and human
rights and is clearly racist. It restricts
the work of human rights groups and
imposes more limitations on them;
it aims to silence them and curtail
their influence at the international
and local levels.
TB: You do not rely on international
aid or relief projects for steering
your direction. How can allies
provide support in this difficult

10 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
period, politically or financially?
UAWC: There is an urgent need to
ensure the work of the classified
organizations, especially UAWC,
given the dramatic decline in
external funding due to the threats
of the Israeli government to the
donors. The organizations are
suffering from a financial crisis as a
result of the designation. Therefore
there is a need for campaigns to
raise funds for us, based on the
importance of supporting the right of
these organizations to continue their
work as defenders of human rights.
TB: For those of us in the United
States, do you see value in petitions,
letter-writing campaigns, and
legislative strategies such as Rep.
Betty McCollum’s introduction of
House Resolution 751 “condemning
the oppressive designation by
the Government of Israel of six
prominent Palestinian groups as
terrorist organizations…”? 7
UAWC: We believe that the position
of the US Administration is the
most important, because Israel is a
pampered ally of the United States.
Therefore, the US Administration
is the only one capable of forcing
Israel to retract the decision. The
efforts of petitions, official letters,
etc. constitute an important role in
pushing a demand from the people
to officials. If continued in efficient
ways, they can ultimately pressure
the Administration to blatantly
denounce the decision and demand
its revocation.
In an earlier effort to discredit
UAWC, Israel arrested two former
UAWC staff members in October
2019, charged them with a terrorist
act, and claimed the organization
was allied with the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine.
One of UAWC’s main donors, the
government of the Netherlands,
subsequently announced it
was suspending funding and
commissioned an independent
investigation of UAWC’s activities
from 2012 to 2020. As in the case of
a similar 2012 Australian report, the
Dutch inquiry found no evidence for
the accusations when it concluded in
November 2021.8 In spite of finding
no new support for the recent Israeli
claims, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign
Affairs announced on January 5, 2022
that it was discontinuing all support
for UAWC—much to the dismay of the
NGO, its supporters, and proponents
of the “rule of law.”
The Israeli attacks on Palestinian
human rights groups may seem
irrational, but they are part of a
multi-faceted plan to seize and
undermine traditional Palestinian
lands, homes, and livelihoods. The
weapons of occupation are multiple
and ruthless—military, police,
and settler violence; demolition
of homes and mosques; seizure of
private and communal land for
“recreational areas” that exclude
Palestinians; bulldozing of arable
land, degradation of the soil by aerial
spraying of chemical herbicides, and
theft of water rights; afforestation of
farming and grazing lands leading
to displacement and disastrous fires;
and extreme violence in suppressing
protests against all of these life-
denying strategies.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Notes
1. “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians:
Cruel System of Domination and Crime
Against Humanity,” Amnesty International,
February 1, 2022.
2. “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities
and the Crimes of Apartheid and
Persecution,” Human Rights Watch, April
27, 2021; “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy
from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea: This is Apartheid,” B’Tselem, January
12, 2021.
3. Maureen Clare Murphy, “What Makes
Amnesty’s Apartheid Report Different?”
Electronic Intifada, February 3, 2022.
4. Ahmad Al-Dabash, “History starts in Jerico
[Arabic],” Al-Jazeera, November 8, 2017,
‫أريحا‬-‫من‬-‫يبدأ‬-‫التاريخ‬.
5. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1995, divided
the Occupied West Bank into three areas,
A, B, C. In Area C, covering 60 percent of
the West Bank (about 330,000 hectares)
where 300,000 Palestinians and more
than 340,000 Israeli settlers live. Israel
controls all security and civil-related
issues, including land allocation, planning,
construction, and infrastructure. The
Palestinian Authority is solely involved
in the provisioning of education and
healthcare. Access to lands for Palestinian
development, and farming, is restricted to
30 percent of the territory of Area C, the
remaining 70 percent are closed military
zones and nature reserves that require
special permits for development. See
Ahmad El-Atrash, “Israel’s Stranglehold
on Area C: Development as Resistance,”
Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network,
September 27, 2018.
6. Rami Almeghari, “Saving Seeds, Counting
Cows: Work of a ‘Terror’ Group?” January
26, 2022, Electronic Intifada.
7. “McCollum Resolution Calls on the U.S
House to Condemn Isrrael's Decision to
Designate Six Prominent Palestinian
Human Rights and Civil Society Groups
as Terrorist Organizations,” U.S.
Congresswoman Betty McCollum, October
28, 2021.
8. Mustafa Abu Sneineh, “Netherlands ends
funding to Palestinian agricultural NGO
outlawed by Israel," Middle East Eye, January
6, 2022.
11
 Translated and edited by
Nadine Fattaleh and Adam Albarghouthi

Agroecology,
from Palestine to
the Diaspora
With the participation of Saad Dagher, Mohammad Khweirah, Muhab Alalami,
Adham Karajeh, Arafat Barghouthi, Rami Massad, Qays Hamad

On a biweekly basis, you’ll find a farmer’s market set up on
tables laid out in front of the cultural center in Ramallah. A
number of agricultural cooperatives from the surrounding
municipalities come to sell their organic produce to passersby
and to regular customers that come out in their support. Most
of these cooperatives are youth-led farms inspired by a surge of
interest in new models of community-supported farming using
agroecological methods.
This farmer’s market isn’t just a place to buy organic produce,
it’s a place to get a taste of what’s to come. The Palestinian youth
today are paving the way toward establishing food sovereignty
and reducing dependence on the products and employment of
the occupation. They uphold their values and principles through
a cooperative organizational model centered on equity amongst
farmers themselves, and between farmers and their community.
We share with you below a transcript of a webinar that brought
together various individual and collective initiatives working in
alternative farming from across Palestine and the diaspora.
Introduction
Saad Dagher: I am an agricultural engineer, and I’ve
been in the field of agroecology since 1996. In 2007,
I started the Humanistic Farm, which went through
different phases and has enriched my experience. I
oversee my own farm, and I conduct training for farmers
and agricultural engineers in Palestine and around the
world. I worked in Yemen and Jordan in 2003, then I
moved on to work in Morocco, Lebanon, and Portugal.
Three years ago, I initiated, with friends and colleagues,
the Palestine Agroecology Forum, and we inaugurated
February 23 as the Palestinian Day of Community-
Supported Agroecology. We convened several conferences
on the topic through my work with the Arab Union of
Agricultural Engineers. Concurrently, I started working
on collecting, preserving, and developing local seeds. I
am currently establishing an initiative called Khabiyeh,
to share and expand local seeds with communities
of farmers. I am a member of several international
movements on farming and environmental conservation.
Mohammad Khweirah: My journey in farming
started three years ago, on an ad hoc basis, through
participating in numerous trainings and building on my
mother’s rich knowledge of agriculture. I am involved
with a number of initiatives. The first is the Peasant
Farm “‫”أرض الفالح‬, a private family farm I work on with
my brother Abdullah. I am a member of the Peasants
Land Cooperative “‫ ”تعاونية أرض الفالحين‬in Kufr Ne’emeh,
where I mainly advise on various technical aspects like
the production of organic fertilizer. A few months ago,
I joined Om Sleiman Farm, which runs a community-
supported agriculture program. In general, we strive to
produce a large amount of fruits and vegetables with the
lowest production price, through reducing our reliance
on external inputs. We are also slowly learning, in
West Ramallah, various ways to market our products.

12 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 Nadine Fattaleh

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 13


Inspired by Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi, radical graphics of the Palestinian revolution.
Our mothers were initially our sales representatives,
encouraging their friends to buy our products through
word of mouth. Recently, we’ve turned to setting up
stalls in the village, and things have been surprisingly
positive, where sales on good days can amount to 900
shekels (280 USD). My primary concern is to cater to our
village of five to six thousand people. Currently, we are
trying to centralize a community to share agricultural
inputs for all the farms in the area.
Muhab Alalami: I am the founder of Om Sleiman Farm
along with Mohammad Abujayyab, who is a refugee from
the Gaza Strip. When we first thought about starting a
farm we had no money, but Mohammad was influenced
by the Community-Supported Agriculture model. We got
a piece of land, and the first season we produced for eight
families, then ten families, and today, we serve sixty
families. The farm is in a village called Bil’in, bordering
the occupation wall. I am excited to share our experience
and to learn from others in overcoming our challenges
in production, marketing, and perhaps the community is
at the core of it all.
Adham Karajeh: I am from Saffa village, and I’m a
member of Ard Al-Ya’as “‫( ”أرض اليأس‬Land of Despair)
Cooperative. Our cooperative started at the end of 2017,
with four people, and now it’s extended to include
sixteen people. We developed from Ba’ali, or rainfed
agriculture, to irrigated-open fields, and today, we
cultivate crops inside greenhouses. To continue to
survive, we constantly evolve and learn through training
and visits to other farms. Land of Despair, as a name,
14
Nadine Fattaleh
is derived from Nietzche’s understanding of despair as
the price paid to acquire self-awareness. In this world, it
seems the more we know, the more despair we feel, but
at the same time, we use this despair to fuel a productive
path towards the future. Our aim is to develop the
cooperative, and to reach our social goals, to enshrine
communal values, and instill a reciprocal relationship
with nature.
Arafat Barghouthi: I am from Deir Ghassaneh, a village
in Ramallah. I am involved with Ard Kanaan “‫”أرض كنعان‬
(Land of Canaan), a humble initiative which started two
years ago. We are a group of young people, most of us
former detainees. We thought of ways to work in this
country, to establish economic and job security, while
serving our nationalist message. We rely on our land
and labor, away from the culture of consumerism that
is taking shape in Palestine. Our cooperative is involved
in poultry farming, producing eggs and chicken meat
that drives consumers away from a reliance on the
occupation. On our 9 dunum (appximately 2.2 acre) piece
of land, we’re also growing fodder for our chickens, and
to market to Palestinian farmers more broadly in support
of self-sufficiency in organic, non-chemical fodder
consumption, reducing the need for imported inputs
from the occupation. We are experimenting with five
different plants that can be used to produce fodder, and
we’re hoping to mechanize the process in the future.
Rami Massad: I represent the Youth Partnership Forum,
an umbrella organization bringing together a number
of youth initiatives working in the West Bank and Gaza,
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1

inside of Occupied Palestine and across the diaspora.
Activists gather through our national committee to set
agendas and priorities for our work, and one of these
issues is the cooperatives. We all agree that it’s an
economic and social alternative precinct to our national
aspirations in the context of Palestine. We insist on
a popular appeal to ensure the sustainability of our
project. On the ground, we offer a space for cooperatives
to share, learn, and develop their experiences, offering
holistic interventions that range from raising awareness
to providing administrative and agroecological training
to farmers. In recent years, we have organized markets
in the municipalities depending on the needs of small
farmers, in addition to a year-long biweekly farmers
market in Ramallah offering organic products at a fair
price. We also mobilize a support circle called friends
of the farmer to offer immediate support and relief to
agricultural cooperatives in emergency situations. This
ensures the autonomy of their work away from foreign
funding. We are currently exploring expanding this to a
cooperative fund that provides insurance and protection
that sustains the continuity of small farmer initiatives.
Qays Hamad: I am a doubly displaced Palestinian
originally from Tiberius, and currently residing in
Greece, where I work with a cooperative established
a year and a half ago called Hakoura. We started
Hakoura because we believe that as Palestinians, we
are deeply connected to the land. Faced with a stifled
economic situation in Greece and the absence of a
refugee integration program, we turned to cooperative
agriculture to generate a livelihood. We learned from
our Greek friends, who also took to farming in times
of economic collapse. Through our networks, we found
fertile agricultural areas that resemble the soils in
Palestine. We rented a piece of land and grew fruits and
vegetables for the first season, but our experience was
interrupted because the price of production, especially
the cost of the vehicle that moves produce from the
countryside to the city, was too high. We’ve just bounced
back and rented another 10 dunum (approximately
2.5 acre) plot with a water well. This was largely
through the support of a crowdfunding campaign
predicated on solidarity and not charity; allowing us
to continue farming away from donor organizations
and their strictures. As we try to stand on our feet, we
feel energized and motivated by our connection and
collaboration with other young farmers and cooperatives
in Palestine. We must continue to maintain our
connection to the homeland, and farming in Greece is
our own form of return to our villages, through planting
local seeds to smell and taste Palestine.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Why cooperatives, why agroecology? Are
they really economically viable?
Qays: Why cooperatives? In general, I prefer the
cooperative to formal employment. When you are a
member of a cooperative, rather than a worker, you
feel a sense of ownership over the project. The more
you produce, the more you’ll be able to take home to
your family. You are autonomous, there is no manager,
feudalist or capitalist controlling you. There is more
dignity in cooperation, and more production, too.
Mohammad: What I value about agroecology is it
produces, quite simply, tastier fruits and vegetables with
rich flavor. All our customers believe this! Secondly,
agroecology is predicated on developing a holistic system
that doesn’t require external inputs. You have trees,
seasonal bushes, and animals, and they can exist in a
harmonious, symbiotic relationship. As farmers, we are
not industrialists and we do not exist in a laboratory
setting. We utilize everything that is available around
us: this is why we have chickens, we don’t throw away
weeds, and we try to reuse everything. Of course, we
work on small tracts of land. But there are studies and
research proving the efficacy even of large farms that
work to integrate natural resources with the labor of
farmers and the work of machines.
Muhab: Om Sleiman farm is not a cooperative, with all
my respect to cooperatives. We considered becoming
a cooperative, but since it requires registration, and
some degree of official oversight, we decided we have
no faith in the administrative mechanisms around us.
We believe in the essence of cooperatives, in working
collaboratively and challenging capitalist hegemony. In
terms of agroecology, it is cheaper because it requires
no fertilizer, and works through mimicking nature.
Agroecological methods are highly productive, and it’s a
myth that it produces less yield. One challenging aspect
I’ve found concerns the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
For example, most of the tomatoes you eat are either
hybrid or genetically modified, and this is to economize
shipping processes for produce that lands in your
supermarket. For small farmers like us, agroecology is
more suitable to the context, it guarantees independence
and it’s the future of agricultural sovereignty.
Saad: I increasingly lean towards distinguishing
between agriculture and farming. Agriculture is an
occupation but farming is a way of life. We need a
different way of life that centers the production of food.
Farming also encapsulates social relations. Here’s where
I get to the cooperative model. The idea of cooperation
15
is about working together. What turned us away from
the official cooperatives is the distortion that happened
in the context in Palestine, as a result of development
organizations, and later the Palestinian Authority.
Having worked with several of these organizations, I can
testify to the negative role they played in obfuscating the
very idea of cooperation under the cooperative model.
The cooperatives present here, like Ard Al Ya’as and Kufr
Ne’emeh, differ from officially registered cooperative
societies. Their ideologies and practices are different.
There can be no
liberation if we don’t
have sovereignty
over our daily bread.
Agroecology is a
way towards food
sovereignty, which
can then enable us to
consider questions
of political liberation.
Why agroecology? There’s the nationalist bent, and
I always question, as a person, what I can do for my
country. I promote the conviction that we need a model
of food production without relying on the occupier. For
example, all chemical fertilizers that enter our market
are controlled, in one way or another, by the occupier.
There can be no liberation if we don’t have sovereignty
over our daily bread. Agroecology is a way towards
food sovereignty, which can then enable us to consider
questions of political liberation.
Rami: The idea of cooperatives in Palestine is not new,
the first was established in 1924. Cooperatives have long
played an important nationalist and economic role in
the country. Things changed with the establishment
of the Palestinian Authority after the signing of the
Oslo Accords, and the influx of foreign funding. Land
is the essence of our struggle with the occupation. We
know about the settlements and the Apartheid Wall.
16 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
The protection of land is our real duty. We must do
this in concrete ways and not through empty speeches
and slogans. The economic aspect has been addressed.
The consumerist model is necessarily tied to the
cleaves of the occupation. How can we talk about a
solidarity economy of resistance when we don’t have
any production? How can we boycott the occupation’s
goods without producing alternatives? On a social level,
the current moment dominated by the PA’s policy, and
international donors to a lesser extent, promotes a
culture of individualism. This is reflected in our current
way of life. This is why it’s important to rethink a
collectivist model, to go back to solidarity and mutual
aid. We need to think about collective liberation, and not
individual liberation.
What are some of your successes or
challenges?
Rami: Our economy is under occupation. The market
is open, and perhaps flooded by Israeli products with
the consent of the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian
famers and cooperatives face problems with marketing
because the occupation’s products are cheaper. This is a
problem, and the solution starts with a popular appeal
for supporting Palestinian produce.
Two years ago, Israeli watermelons flooded the
Palestinian market and undermined the price. Farmers
in the Jordan Valley left their watermelons in the
fields, reasoning that the additional price and effort of
the harvest will not be compensated by the distorted
market price. When grassroots organizations mobilized
to support the farmers, advertising the watermelons in
various municipalities, thirty tons were sold. The fruits
and vegetables that arrive in shops and supermarkets
don’t have tracing codes: there is no indication if this
is Palestinian or Israeli produce. There’s the political
dimension to limiting the smuggling of Israeli goods
into Palestinian markets, and setting limits on imports,
but these are far fetched, as they are tied to diplomatic
agreements. This is why we rely on popular awareness
in marketing, and we’ve seen huge success with the
local farmer’s market in Ramallah. We need to study the
possibility of expanding this to all municipalities, and to
continue to look for avenues to connect with the masses.
Arafat: In Palestine, we are forced to consider the
political ramifications of all aspects of our lives. After
Oslo, with the rule of the Palestinian Authority and
the arrival of nongovernmental organizations, our
values of cooperation and mutual aid have come under
attack. The cooperatives have allowed us to maintain
our connection to the land, and to rebuild collectivist
notions of solidarity amongst our workers and those who
have supported us and provided us moral grounding.
Our farm is now a madafeh, or a communal space that
welcomes visits from all class backgrounds and political
inclinations.
Qays: Working in Greece, we initially assumed we
needed to work according to the demands of the market.
The European Union market for organic produce is very
big and quite competitive. With time, we started to
learn new ways for marketing. One of our cooperative
members once shared a simple link for signing up
for weekly or monthly produce boxes, developing a
Community Supported Agriculture model. We found
an outpouring of solidarity from Greek citizens who
are neither our neighbors nor acquaintances, but who
signed up and supported us nonetheless. All cooperatives
AVO TOAST
4 BREAKFAST
1 EGG
Modesto, California
From hens that lay 300 eggs/year
instead of 10–15 pre-industrial production.
1 SLICE O’ TOAST
Alberta, Canada
Wheat grown on soil desicated
with glyphosate, courtesy of Monsanto.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
need to adapt to their contexts, to managing online
subscriptions or working with shops and markets.
Saad: The main challenge I fear is the potential
damage of official institutions. Agroecology is
threatened by development and donor organizations, or
anyone who might potentially work with agroecology
on a shallow level. There’s a question of maintaining
all the central tenets of agroecology, based on a
productive, cooperative, and liberatory model. Fifteen
years ago, no one cared about agroecology. Today,
people might suggest combining agroecology with
the use of genetically modified seeds. Others see that
agroecology has become a catchphrase that attracts
foreign donors. We need to remain vigilant about
these potential challenges, and to remain committed
to a popular support for the holistic application of
agroecology in Palestine.
1 AVOCADO
Ziracuratiro, México
Region controlled by cartels.
2 TBSP. CILANTRO
Madhya Pradesh, India
Farmed by peasant families
subsisting on 600 USD/year.
½ LIME
Mission, Texas
Harvested by migrant laborers
from México without legal protection.
Illustrated by Isabel Holtan
17
 Dan Nott

18 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 DEBT AND THE
TRANSITION TO
REGENERATIVE
AGRICULTURE
I S A AC B I S S EL L
I grew up in a small town in Vermont, and like many
I learned to love the smell of fresh cow manure being
spread on fields in the spring. Yet, beyond the connection
between that smell and the milk on the table, I
understood almost nothing about dairy or Vermont’s
farm economy. It wasn’t until I started working in
the legal department at the Vermont Land Trust (VLT)
that I began to understand the way the state’s farm
economy actually functions. My role as a paralegal
involved managing the legal aspects of conservation
easement acquisition projects from the initial drafting of
documents through the final acquisition. While I worked
on both farm and forest projects, due to my interests,
and the region of the state I was assigned to, the majority
of the projects I worked on were farmland conservation
easements.
Around the time I began working for VLT, I also became
intensely interested in soil carbon sequestration
as a potential tool to address climate change. The
combination of my interest in soil carbon dynamics and
my consistent exposure to a variety of large scale farm
operations and practices allowed me to probe deeply
into our farm economy as it presently exists, and into
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
the barriers that stand in the way of a transition to the
alternative methods of production that are capable of
helping us adapt to and mitigate climate change. While
I came to understand that there are many complex and
interconnected issues, two barriers stood out to me as
particularly problematic: the consolidation of farmland
ownership and debt.
Despite our image as a bucolic state that cares deeply
about the environment, Vermont is managing
agricultural production in ways that are entirely
consistent with federal agricultural policy. As a result, we
are dealing with the same economic and environmental
issues as the rest of the country. Nationally, we have
seen the average farm size more than double from 1940
to 2000, and now almost half of gross farm sales come
from farms nearly 3,000 acres in size.¹ Vermont’s dairy
economy, which presently accounts for the majority of
the state’s agricultural production, is therefore oriented
towards the large operations that have been able to
survive in a competitive agricultural market by growing
and achieving economies of scale. While we have seen
this loss of small farms, we have seen our largest farms
grow dramatically, with the largest dairies in Vermont
19
now operating on around 5,000 acres of land. The total
number of dairy farms in Vermont has fallen from
around 4,000 farms in the 1970s to only 677 farms by
2020,² and yet, the total volume of milk production has
actually increased.³ Smaller operations have for the
most part simply been absorbed into a farm economy
that is driven by these extremely large operations. These
economies of scale are necessary in order to reduce a
farm’s cost of production to the point that it can be
profitable.
The need to shift away from a farm economy dominated
by the production of one commodity is widely
recognized. Opinions about what this shift should
consist of vary widely, depending on who you are talking
to. The last decade has seen an increasing focus on
farm water quality, as phosphorous runoff from dairies
has contributed to significant algae blooms in Lake
Champlain and other local lakes and ponds. The dairy
industry has instituted a number of new practices to
reduce their farm runoff. These changes have resulted in
water quality improvements on some farms. Lobbyists
for the dairy industry state that some conventional dairy
farms are meeting their climate obligations by cover
cropping annually, by eliminating tillage, by injecting
liquid manure instead of applying it on the soil surface,
and by using other means to minimize damage to
ecosystems.4
While there have been measurable and meaningful
improvements on certain metrics, the vision advanced by
the dairy industry and industrial agricultural lobbyists
is not regenerative in any sense of the word. The dairy
farms that implement these practices still pollute, they
just pollute less. When it comes to the practice of no till,
we have seen significant increases in the application of
herbicides, as cover crops are terminated annually using
20 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
an evolving cocktail of chemical herbicides.5 Even if you
were to accept the environmental consequences, the
simple reality is that an agricultural market dominated
by the production of one commodity simply isn’t capable
of providing the food security we require.
It is widely recognized that climate change is going to
create serious food security issues. Not only is it more
difficult to grow food in our increasingly chaotic and
unpredictable climate, but our food supply has come to
rely on incredibly fragile global distribution systems that
will be easily disrupted as our environmental conditions
continue to deteriorate. The COVID-19 pandemic has
taught us that disruptions to the supply chain can
cause shortages at the grocery store that materialize
in a matter of days. With climate chaos bearing down
on us, we would do well to learn our lesson about the
fragility of the just-in-time delivery system and work
immediately to produce our food much closer to its point
of consumption while using systems of agriculture that
are capable of regularly producing in erratic weather
patterns.
A system of small,
management-intensive
farms working in a
decentralized self-
organizing network would
mirror the resilience,
productivity and diversity
of an ecosystem that
has been freed from
industrial disturbance.
What differentiates the fragile and polluting farm
economy we have today from one that regenerates the
land while producing a diversity of food in an unstable
climate? The fundamental difference between these two
farm economies is that one is capital-intensive, while
the other is management-intensive.6 A management-
intensive operation is one in which the primary
asset of the agricultural operation is the observation,
engagement and intervention by farm workers.7 A
management-intensive operation simply has far more
farm worker engagement per acre than a capital-
intensive operation. In a capital-intensive operation,
the primary assets are capital investments acquired
using loans from a bank, which are then utilized to
operate at the greatest scale possible using as little
labor as possible, with the goal of reducing production
costs and maximizing profit through the achievement
of economies of scale. Both management- and capital-
intensive operations utilize labor and capital to achieve
a yield. What differentiates them is the balance between
labor and capital.
which operates on 3,100 acres, was put on the market
for $23 million. Due to the substantial investments
in infrastructure and equipment, the farm has its
highest value as a dairy, and therefore all of the land,
infrastructure, animals and equipment were marketed
together.9 There simply wasn’t a way to unbundle this
huge capital investment without losses to the bank.
Unfortunately, the dairy industry is struggling, and they
weren’t able to find a buyer. It remains to be seen how the
farm owners will unwind the farm so that they can retire.

Management-intensive farms tend to be smaller, as the

importance of human observation and engagement acts
as a natural barrier to developing scale. These smaller CONSOLIDATION IN DAIRY
farms also tend to be more diverse, as crop rotation FARMING IN THE UNITED STATES
and the inclusion of animals are prioritized in order
to maximize ecosystem health and to reduce inputs. A 60

Number of farms (Thousand)

system of small, management-intensive farms working 50
in a decentralized self-organizing network would mirror 40
the resilience, productivity and diversity of an ecosystem
30
that has been freed from industrial disturbance. What a
20 Farm size by
healthy ecosystem demonstrates is that the most efficient # of milk cows:
10
means of cycling energy within a system is through a 10
complex network of relationships between mutually 0 50
1992 1997 2002 2007 2012 2017 100
beneficial organisms. It is resilient not just because it is
200
diverse, but because it is a decentralized self-organizing 500
50
system, wherein portions of the system are capable of 1000
>1000
Market share (%)

functioning on their own should they be severed from 40

the larger network. These are the features that we should 30

be trying to replicate as we design a new agricultural
20
economy. By orienting ourselves towards management-
10
intensive operations, we would be doing just that.
0

Transitioning to a management-intensive agricultural 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012 2017

economy requires us to have much smaller, more diverse

farms along with many more farmers. Unfortunately,
farmland consolidation has required huge capital
investments, which have resulted in extremely large
accumulations of debt that ultimately perpetuate the
capital-intensive system.8 For the largest operations in
Vermont, these debt loads can be well over ten million
dollars and have reached the point where shifting away
from a conventional dairy operation is not possible under
their present economic circumstances. These high debt
loads have locked large farms into this specific method
of production due to the illiquidity of the assets that the
debts are tied to, and due to the inability of alternative
methods of production to generate enough net operating
income to cover the total debt payments.
An example of one of Vermont’s larger dairies, which
went up for sale in 2019, illustrates some problems
we face in transitioning our agricultural economy
towards a management-intensive approach. This farm,
Source data and code can be found at
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
Because of the scale of debt and the consolidation of
farmland ownership, if we are to shift from capital-
intensive agriculture to management-intensive
agriculture, the US government will need to provide debt
relief that is tied to the breaking up of the largest farm
operations. This farmland will need to be redistributed
to many smaller management-intensive operations. As
management-intensive operations require far more labor,
there will need to be a massive retraining program so
that workers can learn how to regeneratively manage
agricultural soils. We also need to consider the market
forces that drove this accumulation of debt in order to
make sure that a new agricultural system removes the
forces that drive this constant expansion of farms and
the associated accumulation of capital. This is a tall

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 21

order indeed, and it is simply one of the structural shifts
that must occur if we are to stabilize the climate before
crossing the much discussed but poorly understood
tipping points that are likely to result in cascading and
unpredictable effects. I wish I had a coherent roadmap
to achieving the types of revolutionary changes that are
now required, but of course I do not.
What I am suggesting is that any path forward must have
a fundamentally radical orientation, and that efforts
to achieve incremental change through immediate
legislation must be accompanied by organizing that
is oriented towards building a movement for more
fundamental changes to the structure of our society
and economy. We must account for the major economic
barriers that stand in the way of the transition that
is necessary, and orient ourselves towards efforts that
address the underlying causes of the crisis, rather
than focusing exclusively on the attempt to mitigate
the destructive impacts that result from our capitalist
industries. This approach requires that we first analyze
the system as it presently exists in order to identify
the root causes of the problems that we are facing.
The fundamental problem posed by the accumulation
of capital, consolidation of land ownership, and the
associated debts must be overcome if we are to shift away
from an agricultural economy dominated by commodity
production.
22 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Notes
1. Joe W. Lewis, A New Farm Language: How a Sharecropper’s Son Discovered
a World of Talking Plants, Smart Insects, and Natural Solutions (Greely:
Acres USA, 2021), 45.
2. Lisa Rathke, “Number of Vermont Dairy Farms Drops to an Average
of 677,” AP News, January 30, 2020.
3. Dan D’Ambrosio, “How Vermont Dairy Farms Have Changed: Bigger
Herds, More Efficient Production,” Burlington Free Press, May 11, 2021.
4. Marie Audet, “A Revolution to Fight Climate Change is Growing
Under Our Feet,” NMPF National Milk Producers Federation,
accessed April 26, 2022; Vermont House Committee on Agriculture
and Forestry, “House Agriculture and Forestry 01-19-2021-1,”
streamed live January 19, 2021 on Zoom.
5. Daniel Elias, Lixin Wang, and Pierre-Andre Jacinthe, “A Meta-
Analysis of Pesticide Loss in Runoff Under Conventional Tillage and
No-Till Management,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 190,
no. 2: 79.
6. Claire Kremen, Alistair Iles, and Christopher Bacon, “Diversified
Farming Systems: An Agroecological, Systems-based Alternative to
Modern Industrial Agriculture,” Ecology and Society 17, no. 4 (2012): 44;
Liz Carlisle et al., “Transitioning to Sustainable Agriculture Requires
Growing and Sustaining an Ecologically Skilled Workforce,” Frontiers
in Sustainable Food Systems, 3, no. 96 (November 2019): 1-8.
7. In this case, the term “management” isn’t referring to the
relationships between farm owners and farm employees, but rather
is referring to the intensity of human interactions with
the landscape.
8. A good example of the type of capital investment that perpetuates
our present agricultural economy is the present drive to build
manure digesters on dairy farms. The pitch is that by investing in
manure digesters we can reduce methane emissions and help with
water quality issues, all while generating renewable energy. In
addition to fundamental questions about the environmental
benefits of this method of energy production, this investment in
technology simply represents a doubling down on capital intensive
methods of production and will make the transition away from
this method of production more difficult in the future. For a recent
critique, see Jenny Splitter, “America Has A Manure Problem, and the
Miracle Solution Being Touted Isn’t All that it Seems,” The Guardian,
Jan 20, 2022.
9. Molly Walsh, “Big Ag Sale: Is There a Market for a $23 Million
Vermont Dairy Farm?,” Seven Days, November 20, 2019.
Ashley Fent

The New
“Green Revolution”
for Africa—
A Revolution for
Farmers, or for
Corporate Profits?
An Interview with Daniel Maingi
In 2006, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller We in the Community Alliance for Global Justice first
Foundation created the Alliance for a Green Revolution became aware in 2007 that the Gates Foundation was
in Africa (AGRA) with an initial grant of $150 million, promoting this new and problematic “green revolution.”
claiming to help African farmers and transform In response, we founded AGRA Watch in 2008, as a
African agriculture.1 Over the past fifteen years, the campaign of Community Alliance for Global Justice
Gates Foundation and other smaller donors (including (CAGJ), a Seattle-based nonprofit that emerged after the
Canadian, US, British, and German development WTO protests in 1999, with the aim of continuing to
agencies) have contributed nearly $1 billion to AGRA.2 challenge US and corporate hegemony over trade and

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 23

AGRA Watch action at the Gates Foundation, Seattle, July 2021.
food systems. Over the past thirteen years, AGRA Watch
has monitored and researched the Gates Foundation and
AGRA, issued public statements and reports, mobilized
community members through demonstrations and
protests, and developed campaigns in close consultation
with partners in Africa, including the Alliance for Food
Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), which regroups civil society
organizations and networks that together represent
over two hundred million small-scale food producers on
the African continent. We engage in regular exchange
with AFSA and its member organizations, and hosted a
broader discussion about food sovereignty in Seattle in
2014 that included members of AFSA, La Via Campesina,
and other African farmer associations.
AGRA has long been criticized by civil society
organizations and farmers’ associations in Africa, on
numerous grounds. AGRA’s promotion of industrial
agriculture has systematically undermined food
sovereignty, or the right of people to define their
own food systems and ensure healthy and culturally
appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound
and sustainable methods. By contrast, the US-style
industrial agriculture model AGRA pushes in Africa
enables large agribusiness corporations and private
companies to gain a foothold in African agriculture—
24
now seen by many investment and business consulting
firms as a new frontier for growth.3 AGRA has also come
under fire for promoting genetically-modified organisms
(GMOs), both overtly and more subtly as part of an
increasing emphasis on “climate-smart agriculture.”
Attempting to create business opportunities in African
agriculture, AGRA has directed funding to groups that
push for national seed privatization laws, pro-GMO
biosafety laws, and fertilizer laws that open up African
markets. Additionally, AGRA is non-transparent in its
grantmaking, decision-making, and monitoring and
evaluation of its programs.4 And while AGRA claims
to be African-led, it is legally registered in the US and
fewer than half of its board members are African (at the
time of this writing). It also claims to help smallholder
farmers, but most of the farmers who are able to take
advantage of AGRA’s interventions and programs are
larger-scale, better-resourced commercial farmers.5
After fifteen years, it is clear that AGRA has even failed
to meet its own objectives. Yields remain comparatively
low when small-scale farmers apply Green Revolution
technology, and malnutrition, hunger, and poverty
have in many cases increased in the countries where it
operates.6
AGRA is part of a much larger ecosystem of investors,
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
philanthropic foundations, and corporations working
together to pressure African governments to open up
new markets for industrial and chemical-intensive
agriculture (and attendant devices, tools, and
technologies) in Africa. As one of the largest private
philanthropic foundations in the world, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation plays an important role within
this wider ecosystem, donating not only to AGRA but
also to the African Agricultural Technology Foundation
(AATF), the African Biosafety Network of Expertise
(ABNE), and numerous other pro-agribusiness and pro-
GMO initiatives, like the Cornell Alliance for Science.7
These institutions—some of which the Gates Foundation
had a hand in creating in the first place—work to ensure
that African smallholder farmers have very little voice
over agricultural policies in their own countries.
We sat down with our friend and partner Daniel Maingi,
Programs Manager at Growth Partners Africa and
Coordinator of the Kenya Food Rights Alliance, to discuss
the impact of the Gates Foundation and AGRA on African
agriculture, smallholder farmers, and food sovereignty.
Ashley: The Gates Foundation’s website states: “We
invest in tools, technologies, and market infrastructure
to help smallholder farmers in Kenya improve their
productivity and incomes and adapt to climate change.”
Have you seen any evidence that their spending has
helped small-scale farmers in Kenya in these ways?
Daniel: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s
money has not helped small-scale farmers at all. The
fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that their grantees
have pushed have actually created more problems,
like creating resistance among new pests and diseases,
like Tuta absoluta (South American tomato pinworm),
the African stem borer, and fall armyworm. They also
created acidic soils. And that has actually resulted in a lot
of yield loss to farmers.
In terms of market infrastructure, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation has put in a lot of money
to organizations like the One Acre Fund, where they
invested $11.6 million (which is about 1.1 billion
Kenyan shillings). The idea is that the seeds have to be
accompanied by fertilizers and specific pesticides and
herbicides. A lot of the One Acre Fund farmers have
actually gone into debt.
Ashley: How has the Gates Foundation influenced
agricultural policies in Kenya? What do these policies
mean for farmers?
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Daniel: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been
exacting undue influence on local and regional policy
makers. Right from the start, they gave Michigan State
University about $13 million to establish a training
policy center for African biotechnology leaders, so that
they can influence the process and the debate around
biotechnology. Closer back home [in Kenya], the African
Seed Trade Association has received a lot of money
from the Gates Foundation to convince farmers to
replace their indigenous seed with seed that is coming
from corporations and conglomerates. The African
Agricultural Technology Fund (AATF) has received $27
million to influence the adoption of genetically-modified
maize in four African countries, and another $32 million
to educate and create awareness about the benefits of
biotechnology. This is a lot of money that, if it is going to
the biosafety organizations in these countries, it's more
than what governments actually give. Gates’s money,
combined with World Bank money, also ran another
project called Enabling the Business of Agriculture in
Africa.8 And that unfortunately is also another area
where many countries and organizations are forcing
governments to weaken biosafety regulations and create
markets for biotechnology products. That money, when
it is spread to influence policy, means that every other
national organization will have to yield and [follow
along]. AGRA and organizations that are funded by the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation get easier access to
the government than other organizations like my own.
When we go to the government for policy or services,
they're listened to before we even get any admission. And
so, definitely it’s been one of the bad influences in this
area. That needs to be changed, such that all players are
given equal time to be listened to by the government and
decision-makers.
25
 Ashley: Speaking of biotechnology, how have you seen
discussions about GMOs in Kenya change as a result of
involvement by the Gates Foundation, AGRA, AATF, and
other institutions?
Daniel: Because of the monies that have been advanced
to so many organizations that support and work with
the industry, such as AATF, and AGRA, the conversation
around biotechnology products, especially GMOs, has
been lopsided. And we are finding that those that make
it to the newspapers with the stories of benefits are those
that have been influenced by the money coming from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Open Forum for
Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), which is a project by
AATF, has been one of the key areas where government
and policymakers have been told about the benefits of
biotechnology and GMOs. And particularly at this time
when maize, cotton, and cassava are in the pipeline of
being released, the attendance by government officers in
OFAB has definitely shifted the debate towards approving
[GMOs]. And the side of smallholder farmers is not being
listened to, the side of all other thinkers has been totally
ignored because of the huge funds that have come from
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ashley: They claim that GMOs will help small-scale
farmers. Is that true?
Daniel: One of the biggest investments by the
foundation in AGRA, AATF and a few other organizations
has been focused on Water Efficient Maize for Africa
(WEMA). In 2015, about twenty-five new varieties were
released through this project. And we've had over five
years to compare WEMA maize with regular maize
that farmers have planted, including maize that came
from publicly funded organizations, and older varieties.
Farmers have planted WEMA maize side by side with
these other varieties, and the yields [of WEMA] are not as
good, the produce doesn't keep as well, the taste is not as
good as many smallholder farmers are used to. And when
there’s drought, there’s no difference [in yield] at all. To
cope with drought, many of the farmers have actually
been using organic manure and mulching. And this is
resulting in more water retention in the soil—benefiting
the maize—than the engineered technology for water
efficiency in maize. So definitely the GMOs have not
helped and we don’t think that any of them will help in
the time to come.
Ashley: AGRA invested approximately $55 million in
Kenya between 2008 and 2016.9 In more recent years,
AGRA has begun emphasizing regenerative agriculture
and conservation agriculture in their grants.10 Do these
investments actually support agroecology and/or small-
26 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
scale farmers in Kenya?
Daniel: The conversations on agroecology and
regenerative agriculture are slowly being hijacked by
industrial players and agribusiness promoters. The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been funding
organizations that are now beginning to use a lot of their
money to talk about agroecology, but using [industrial
agriculture and biotechnology] products. So, it is like
planting GMO maize, but also using mulch or organic
manure, because there’s a recognition that fertilizers are
failing and smallholder farmers have been succeeding
using organic manure. When you use organic manure,
mulching, and cover crops, which are part and parcel
of regenerative and conservation agriculture, you get a
better yield. But now, when you talk about conservation
agriculture, they want you to use GMO maize. So that
hijacking of regenerative practices, we’re beginning
to see it. And of course, at the end of the day, it is the
corporations and conglomerates that are ending up being
the beneficiaries.
Ashley: Over the past couple of years, the Microsoft
4Afrika initiative—created in 2013 to invest in making
Africa a “cloud-forward” and technology-based
continent—has been partnering with AGRA, the Kenyan
government, and the World Bank to increase digital
technology applications in agriculture.11 How have or
will digital technologies impact farmers?
Daniel: When it comes to digital technologies in
agriculture in Africa, Kenya is at the apex of all sorts
of trials and experimentation, mainly because we
are at the leading edge of adopting technologies and
adopting [mobile] money products in order to change our
livelihoods. We've seen all sorts of apps and new digital
products. And we know for sure that they're not going
to benefit the smallholder farmer in the near future,
because many of these are very expensive technologies.
We know for sure farmers will not be using robotics in
farming. And even if they use digital apps that can take
pictures and record their yield, the problem is actually
bigger than just yield. It is markets, it is what farmers
are culturally used to, and it is what they are able to do.
It will not make any extra money for many farmers if
they’re able to use a tractor with GPS locations. Instead,
the benefits of adopting digital agriculture end up going
to the manufacturers of the technologies, whether
they're tractors or GPS robotics, or even the precision
[agriculture] people. All of this is actually just a way of
creating a story to say that this is now the way to go and
if you don't talk about digital technology, you’re behind.
That does not create sovereignty, and it does not make
farmers more resilient to climate change.
In Africa and around the world, farmers are already
practicing agroecology and other sustainable local and
Indigenous models of food production. The Kenya Food
Rights Alliance, with whom Daniel works, is dedicated
to championing food rights and ensuring that all
human beings are free from hunger, food insecurity,
and malnutrition. They, along with AFSA member
organizations and many other groups and organizations
on the continent, are leading critical efforts to promote
and advance alternatives that achieve a holistic vision
of food self-sufficiency and self-determination, while
fighting against the spread of corporate-controlled,
climate-insensitive industrial agriculture.

Notes
1. Anuradha Mittal and Melissa Moore, eds., Voices from Africa (Oakland:
Oakland Institute, 2009).
2. Timothy A. Wise, Failing Africa’s Farmers: An Impact Assessment of
the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Global Environment
and Development Working Paper No. 20-01. (Medford, MA: Tufts
University, 2020).
3. Lutz Goedde, Amandla Ooko-Ombaka, and Gillian Pais, “Winning
in Africa’s agricultural market,” McKinsey and Company, February
15, 2019.
4. Timothy A. Wise, “AGRA Update: Withheld Internal Documents
Reveal No Progress For Africa's Farmers,” IATP, February 25, 2021.
5. Neil Dawson, Adrian Martin, and Thomas Sikor, “Green Revolution
in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for
the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders,” World Development 78 (2016): notes from “Letter from the Editors ”
204–218; James Boafo and Kristen Lyons, “Ghana’s farmers aren’t
all seeing the fruits of a Green Revolution,” The Conversation,
June 14, 2021,
1. “Stop Food Loss and Waste, for the People, for the Panet,”
6. Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa et al. A Sting in the AGRA The United Nations, accessed March 13, 2022.
Tale: Independent Expert Evaluations Confirm That the Alliance for a Green
2. Henry Saragih, “Why the International Day of Peasants' Struggles is
Revolution Has Failed (2021); Lena Basserman and Jan Urhahn, False
Important,” The Guardian, April 18, 2011.
Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (2020).
3. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, “The Political Economy of
7. AGRA Watch, Messengers of Gates’ Agenda: A Case Study of the Cornell
Agricultural Research,” The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard
Alliance for Science Global Leadership Fellows Program (Seattle: CAGJ, 2020).
University Press: 1985), 211.
8. Matt Canfield, “Why do the World Bank’s new indicators, ‘Enabling
4. The Dialectical Biologist, 220–221.
the Business of Agriculture’ pose a threat to African agriculture?”
CAGJ Blog, January 19, 2017. 5. As John Bellamy Foster writes, “the inherent character of large-scale
agriculture under capitalism prevents any truly rational application
9. Basserman and Urhahn, False Promises.
of the new science of soil management,” and that in spite of the
10. “Farmers in Laikipia County multiplying yields,” AGRA, December advancements made in agricultural science and ecology during
18, 2018; “Regenerative Agriculture Unlocks Business Opportunities the nineteenth century, capitalism was “unable to maintain those
for Rural Communities in Embu, Kenya,” AGRA, October 29, 2021; conditions necessary for the recycling of the constituent elements of
Annual Report (Nairobi: AGRA, 2020). the soil.” See John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2000), 157.
11. Bob Koigi, “Kenya government partners with Microsoft to accelerate
use of tech in agriculture,” Africa Agribusiness, March 19, 2020;” Our 6. The Editorial Collective, “About This Issue,” Science for the People 11,
Story,” 4Afrika. no. 3 (May 1979): 4.

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 27

 This paper cutting,
measuring 2.5’ x 1.5’,
was collected by Britta
Fischer, an early member
of SftP who traveled
to China in 1978 on a
delegation organized by
the US-China People’s
Friendship Association.
A traditional folk art,
paper cutting lent
well to revolutionary
themes. In this case,
the transformation
of the agricultural
landscape through labor
and technology takes
center stage; nestled in
the bottom left corner
we see science serving
production, with
commune members
mixing solutions and
employing a microscope
in a rustic lab while a
simple weather station
and insect trap gathers
necessary data for
agricultural planning.

28 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 EARTHY
KNOWLEDGE:
RETHINKING
CHINESE
TERRACING
CAMPAIGNS
S I G R I D S C H M A L Z ER
A few years ago a friend in the local agriculture
movement recommended I watch a film called Hope in
a Changing Climate. Directed by soil scientist John Liu,
the 2009 documentary features agricultural terracing
practices that restore lands all but lost to erosion
through centuries of overuse, in the process also
sequestering carbon and thus promising to slow climate
change. The film begins in northern China with a
project that since the 1990s has been successfully using
agricultural terracing to transform denuded hills on the
Loess Plateau. Liu then travels to Ethiopia and Rwanda
where similar efforts have had equally dramatic results.1
Although impressed and inspired, I was struck by an
absence, summed up by one word: Dazhai (大寨). To
any student of recent Chinese history, not to mention
people who lived through the 1960s and 1970s in China,
the mass mobilization of peasants to build agricultural
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
terraces cannot but evoke thoughts of the campaign
to “Study Dazhai in Agriculture.” Dazhai is a village in
the Taihang Mountains of northern China: the most
memorable endeavor this rural community cum national
model undertook was the construction of terraces to
conserve water and soil, changing “barren hills” into
productive farmland.
People today, in China and abroad, often seem to forget
that past—or to remember it only selectively. After Mao’s
death and the subsequent initiation of market reforms,
many aspects of the Mao era (1949–76) were repudiated.
In the new political context, what had once served as a
testament to the power of the masses, and an exemplar
of resource conservation, became evidence of the futility,
irrationality, hubris, and above all environmental
destructiveness of Maoist efforts to control nature for
human ends.
29
But as an activist historian, it is my job to make sure
we don’t forget, and to show how a bolder, fuller
understanding of history will aid our political work
today. The history of Mao-era Chinese terracing
campaigns brings into focus both of what Karl Marx
called the “original sources of all wealth,” namely,
“the soil and the worker.” Specifically, it highlights
efforts to conserve soil resources, and it raises
complicated questions about labor and its relationship
to science. I title this essay “Earthy Knowledge” to
capture both of these elements: the soil itself and the
ideal of mass-based science that in Mao-era China was
called tu (土)—literally, “soil.”
CONSERVATION AND CRITIQUE:
OVERLOOKED MAOIST LEGACIES
In 1973, a member of Science for the People’s delegation
to China recorded his feelings upon witnessing the
terraced hills of Xigou Commune on the Loess Plateau:
“We … couldn’t help but feel we had some kind of gut
understanding for why the peasants love Chairman Mao.
Ravine after ravine terraced to the brim. Hopeless land
brought into production.”2 A 2.5’×1.5’ paper cutting,
brought home in 1978 by another SftP member who
visited China, illustrates this vision powerfully (see page
28). And SftP radicals were not alone: mainstream liberal
scientists traveling to China in the 1970s returned to
the US to paint optimistic portraits of the social and
ecological benefits of Mao-era agricultural science and
technology.3
By the mid-1980s, the tide had turned. Vaclav Smil's 1984
The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China set the
stage for a chorus of similar accounts. In her 2001 book
Mao's War against Nature, Judith Shapiro cited example
after example in which the Dazhai model was “blindly
30 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
implemented in ecologically divergent regions,” with
such absurd-sounding slogans as “on flatlands, construct
terraces.”4 More recently, Charles Mann's widely read
book 1493 quoted Smil saying, “It must be one of the
greatest wastes of human labor in history. . . . Tens of
millions of people being forced to work night and day,
most of it on projects that a child could have seen were
a terrible stupidity. Cutting down trees and planting
grain on steep slopes—how could that be a good idea?”5
Together, these histories leave us with a picture of Mao-
era terracing campaigns as fundamentally irrational
manifestations of a rabidly destructive ideology.
There is some truth to these accounts, and much
testimony from sources in China to support them.6
Indeed, the critiques that Shapiro and others have leveled
against the Study Dazhai campaign echo critiques in
the Chinese literature—the term “blindly implemented”
and the specific examples of absurd policies are familiar
fare. A 1980 article published in none other than the
People's Daily offered an especially biting criticism,
squarely aimed at Mao-era authoritarianism. “One gram
of uranium, when processed, can release a tremendous
amount of energy, and a laser beam can pierce through
thick steel. But they pale in comparison with the sound
waves produced by an ordinary whistle. A whistle?
That's right: I mean the iron whistle that our comrades
involved in rural labor often blow.” During the Mao era,
the author argued, that whistle had become “a tool of
authority” with the power “to order, control, punish, or
slap a label on any farmer who dared defy” commands
from above. “‘Toot! Truly or falsely studying Dazhai,
that's the dividing line between the two classes and the
two roads.’ And so we ended up building terraces in the
plains...”7 In other words, authorities used Dazhai and
other examples as ways to enforce the party line on the
“two classes” (laborers and bourgeoisie) and the “two
roads” (socialism and capitalism).
More recently, a Chinese journal article critiqued the
Study Dazhai campaign as an example of “cutting with
a single stroke of the knife” (一刀切, the imposition of
uniformity). The authors acknowledged that the ideal
of uniformity may encourage fairness and adherence to
standards, but they emphasized that a policy that suits
one place will not necessarily suit every place. Testing
policies at multiple sites thus offers a necessary antidote
to “cutting with a single stroke of the knife.”8
Despite the validity of these critiques, they typically
fail to do justice to the sincerity, and often success,
of Mao-era efforts to use terracing for environmental
conservation. In many places, terraces constructed
during the Mao era continue to be maintained today
because they serve agricultural production while
preventing erosion. There are even places where
terracing is recognized as an aspect of “agricultural
heritage,” and yet a significant portion of the existing
terraces were built not during centuries past, but during
the Mao era.9 And, while in some areas trees were felled
to convert hillsides into terraced farmland, in many
others bare hillsides were terraced and planted with
trees, or with grain lined by fruit trees along the weirs
(terrace walls): indeed, tree-planting was an explicit part
of Mao-era terracing campaigns.
The Mao era not only offers
cautionary examples of
environmentally damaging
activities (including some
poorly conceived terracing
projects); it also provides
incisive analytical tools for
criticizing those travesties,
along with inspiring
examples of environmental
conservation.
Critics of Mao-era terracing also typically fail to
acknowledge the Mao-era sources of their critical
insights: that is, the concerns they raise are often the
same as those they have read in Mao-era materials,
articulated by people committed to Maoist scientific
principles, especially regarding the promotion of local
experimentation and resistance to inappropriate outside
models. The phrase “cutting with a single stroke of the
knife” appeared frequently in Mao-era criticisms of
uniformity. For example, a People's Daily article from 1972
discussed a county on Hainan island where the proximity
to both ocean and mountains created diverse conditions.
When county leaders allegedly attempted to “cut with a
single stroke of the knife,” local cadres rebelled, saying,
“We truly cannot do that here.” The article argued that
the true meaning of studying Dazhai lay in investigating
local conditions, listening to the perspectives of the
masses, and studying Mao's exhortation to “make work
plans based on practical circumstances.” And so, instead
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
of cutting with a single stroke of the knife, county
leaders reportedly learned to find “a different key to
open every lock.”10
In sum, the Mao era not only offers cautionary examples
of environmentally damaging activities (including some
poorly conceived terracing projects); it also provides
incisive analytical tools for criticizing those travesties,
along with inspiring examples of environmental
conservation.
LABOR AND KNOWLEDGE: ENDURING
MAOIST PRIORITIES
During the Mao era, the Chinese character 土
(pronounced tu) held multiple potent meanings. At the
material level, it meant the actual soil that farmers
plowed and sowed to grow crops. As Marx recognized,
all production depends on the soil: without careful
attention to nutrient replenishment, resources are
depleted and the “metabolic interaction between
humans and the earth” disrupted—which Marx argued
was occurring in his time at the hands of agricultural
capitalists.11 In China, where much of the land is
mountainous, and farming on the slopes a necessity in
many communities, erosion presents another serious
challenge to soil conservation. Hence, by the 1950s, the
PRC state had already begun studying terracing practices
as part of a major emphasis on conservation of water
and soil (水土保持).
Tu also stood symbolically for a distinctive form of
science rooted in earthy knowledge. Whereas yang
(洋, “ocean”) connoted foreign / ivory-tower / professional
science, tu (土) represented native / grassroots / peasant-
based science.12 Officially, the policy was to “combine
yang and tu,” or as SftP emphasized in the title of their
1974 book on China, to create a science that “walks on
two legs.” In part this was a strategy born of necessity,
making up for gaps in advanced technologies with
low-tech supplements. But Mao and other radicals went
further, arguing that peasant knowledge, accumulated
through labor experience, represented a rich storehouse
that would ensure a truly revolutionary path for socialist
Chinese science. Reflecting this principle, the 1964
article in People’s Daily that introduced the Chinese
public to the model community of Dazhai celebrated
the peasants’ grit: “A clenched hoe, a hoisted shovel, a
broken basket, and a stiff shoulder-pole—these are their
tools.”13
Throughout the Mao era, the grueling labor required to
construct terraces was valorized. In the process, people
31
were often pushed past healthy levels of endurance.
Writings from those days were filled with inspirational,
but also ominous, stories—like that of a 74-year-old
man who was praised for continuing to terrace until
three days before his death: with his last breath he was
reportedly still talking about terracing.14 Such stories
help us realize the legitimacy of criticisms of Mao-era
campaigns. Though they do not tell the whole story,
they do speak to the truth of many people’s experiences.
The claim that terracing campaigns represented
something revolutionary and liberatory, and not just
an effort to squeeze more labor out of local people,
depended on the premise that labor is not mindless,
but rather embodies scientific knowledge and
technological skill. As a 1975 article put it, “The practice
of constructing Dazhai fields proves that the laboring
people are the masters of soil science.” Moreover, the
peasants’ science had “powerfully refuted” the so-called
“law of decreasing soil fertility.” In the old society, the
same forces that exploited the laboring people had also
depleted the fertility of the soil; “reactionary scholars”
became “apologists” for the exploiting classes by
arguing soil depletion was natural “law.” The people of
Dazhai had proven them wrong by developing practices
that combated erosion and created nutrient-dense,
microbiotically active “living soil” that could withstand
both drought and flood.15
The people most credited for the success of such
technologies were those with the most labor experience:
“old peasants.” For example, in She County, Hebei (a
place not far from Dazhai in the Taihang Mountains,
which boasted centuries of terracing history), Mao-era
campaigns emphasized the importance of “old hands
leading new hands.” An old party member, Wang
Tingheng, instructed a technology leadership group in
preserving soil, following the mountain topography, and
selecting suitable stones to construct weirs. Thus, “the
old led the new; one transmitted his knowledge to five;
five transmitted to ten; and the technology problem was
solved.”16
Students of history, and especially of revolutionary
historical periods, face the perennial problem of
determining the degree to which rhetoric reflected the
ideas and experiences of actual people. The evidence
suggests that at least some, but by no means all, scientific
and political elites in Mao-era China did genuinely
respect the contributions peasants made to science. The
voices of peasants are harder to recover, since they very
rarely left records in their own words. The most we can
say is that the esteem granted to old peasants as wielders
of scientific knowledge was an expression of a political
32 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
value promoted by Mao and other radical leaders. Those
same leaders would have readily admitted that the
transformation of the social relations of science was by
no means complete, but would require ongoing struggle.
Maoist respect for the
wisdom of old peasants
was different in important
ways from current leftist
veneration of Indigenous
knowledge preserved
by community elders.
Maoist respect for the wisdom of old peasants was
different in important ways from current leftist
veneration of Indigenous knowledge preserved by
community elders. In particular, Maoist hostility to
“tradition” precluded recognition of the cultural contexts
that had produced agricultural technologies. Somewhat
ironically (given the socialist preference for collectivism),
Mao-era writings instead emphasized the contributions
of individual peasants whose knowledge came from their
own practical experience in labor. A striking example:
Dazhai party secretary and labor model Chen Yonggui
(figure 1) was said to have invented arched weirs to
protect sections of terraces subject to particularly strong
flood waters. In fact, this technology had long been used
in the Taihang Mountains.17
The reluctance in the Mao era to recognize the
significance of traditional culture was especially
pronounced when it came to so-called “backward”
ethnic groups in the mountains of southwest China. For
example, in 1958 an article praised a Lahu nationality
man for rejecting the traditional practice of slash-and-
burn agriculture; with the steadfast support of a local
official (whose name suggested he was probably Han
Chinese), the man reportedly introduced terracing to the
area.18 Even communities that traditionally practiced
terracing were said to require assistance to modernize
their technologies, and were congratulated for
following the model of Dazhai. Today, the significance
of “traditional” knowledge in terracing communities is
far better recognized. Indeed, in the new economy, it
is actively marketed for its value in “heritage tourism.”
However, the concept of “indigenous knowledge”
remains politically sensitive: the PRC state has not
embraced the term “indigenous” to refer to minority
ethnic groups in China and does not characterize the
relationship between the Han majority and ethnic
minorities as colonial.19

LESSONS FOR THE LEFT

A historical look at Chinese terracing campaigns offers

a useful way to dig into questions facing the left today.
I take three lessons from this history.

First, we must revise the overly negative verdict on Mao-

era terracing, which grew out of a triumphalist eagerness
to discredit the ancien régime of radical Maoism. The need
for a clearer understanding of this history is sharpened
by the ecological significance of current terracing efforts
in China and abroad.

Second, the Maoist critical toolkit remains a

powerful, though rarely acknowledged, resource
for environmentalists seeking to promote locally
appropriate agricultural technologies. In particular,
Mao-era writings emphasized the importance of
grassroots, mass-based experimentation and the need to
resist the imposition of outside models unsuited to local
conditions. At the same time, we must acknowledge the
Figure 1: Propaganda poster featuring Chen Yonggui titled “Walking the
flip side: those admonitions appear so frequently in the Dazhai Road,” (1965). Image from chineseposters.net.
historical record in part because conservation efforts
were so often undermined by the dogmatic imposition of traditional social structures that are less than liberatory.
practices associated with national models like Dazhai— And we might draw from Mao-era epistemology a
so aptly critiqued as an “iron whistle” in the 1980 People’s reminder of the role of labor in shaping knowledge—
Daily article discussed above. We would be wise to including knowledge of the soil, that crucial source of all
cultivate an awareness of such contradictory forces in wealth, and of life itself.
our own movements.
Notes

Third, the Mao-era emphasis on knowledge as a product
of individual experience in the practice of labor
contrasts sharply with current Chinese enthusiasm for
knowledge rooted in traditional culture, and even more
with current global interest in indigenous knowledge.
Labor, tradition, and indigeneity all speak to “earthy”
knowledge, but they have different implications for our
political practice. Leftists in the west are considerably
less likely today than we were fifty years ago to view
traditional social structures and cultural practices as
sources of political and economic “backwardness”
and thus legitimate sites for state intervention. We are
more likely to valorize traditional cultures, especially
those associated with indigenous peoples, as essential
antidotes to Western modernity. Yet, even as we rightly
1. Hope in a Changing Climate, directed by John Liu (2009).
2. Anonymous SftP delegate’s personal journal, in the author's collection.
3. See, among many examples, American Insect Control Delegation,
Insect Control in the People's Republic of China (Washington, DC: National
Academy of Sciences, 1977).
4. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in
Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
101, 106–14. Notably, Shapiro’s more recent book, co-authored with
Yifei Li, critiques current environmental policy in the PRC and in
the process offers a considerably more balanced perspective on the
Mao era’s environmental legacy. See Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro, China
Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Cambridge:
Polity, 2020). Michael Muscolino has recently offered a more
nuanced analysis of Mao-era terracing, but he nonetheless continues
the emphasis on the social and ecological harms of the campaigns.
See Micah Muscolino, “The Contradictions of Conservation: Fighting
Erosion in Mao-Era China, 1953–66,” Environmental History 25 (2020);
237–62.

honor some traditional forms of knowledge, we might 5. Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New
York: Knopf, 2011), 187–93.
reflect on the continued need to critique aspects of

notes continue on page 80

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 33

 Max Ajl

National Liberation
and Sovereign
Technology:
The Contribution of
Slaheddine el-Amami magazine.scienceforthepeople.org :‫اقرأ ترجمة عربية لهذا المقال عبر الرابط التال ي‬

From the Chinese Revolution to the Algerian War

of Independence, people engaged in struggles for
decolonization, liberation, and sovereignty have

“For a colonized people fought to reclaim their land and have been willing to
do anything to get it. Frantz Fanon explored the roles

the most essential that land, non-human nature, agriculture, and people
living in the countryside play in social change, conflict,

value, because the

most concrete, is first
and foremost the land:
the land which will
development, liberation, revolution and reaction.
Marxist thought and social science have crystallized
these issues into several “questions,” as this broad sweep
of concerns moved through a series of steps towards
the world-churning struggles for decolonization and
national liberation. The “classical” ones—and what is
classical is, of course, fraught with power dynamics—
were the following. First, the question of politics:
How would European radicals relate to large peasant

bring them bread and, populations in their countries? Second, the questions
of labor and society: How would capitalism’s growth in

above all, dignity.”
— Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
the countryside impact the future of the peasant class?
Was it fated to vanish? Or would it endure? Then, with
the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, a third question
emerged: What was the role of the countryside in
national economic development, specifically as it related
to capital accumulation towards industrialization? 1

34 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
This was a European canon. Although Vladimir Lenin
posed the problem of imperialism with electric verve
and supported the national struggles of the colonized
and dominated world, it remained for the victims of
imperialism to reassess the agents of agrarian social
transformation and rework the agrarian questions to
reflect the needs of the periphery: the poorer parts of
the world, which make up the majority of humanity.
A line of revolutionary thought from Mao Zedong to
Frantz Fanon to Amílcar Cabral brought to the fore
the oppression of the majority by the minority. They
“diagnosed” the periphery as “suffering” from semi-
colonialism and neocolonialism. They elevated the
peasant and rural-dweller to being the core subject
of social revolution, in practice and then in theory.
These shifts gave rise to an entirely new set of agrarian
questions. Their answer was national liberation.2
National liberation was not nationalism. It was not
identical to state sovereignty, nor simply to a national
flag and a seat at the United Nations. Neither was it
the same as the world-breaking-and-making project
of decolonization. Rather, liberation was a response to
imperialism’s control over the national productive forces
of subjugated nations, and to how imperial forces had
wrested control of history, or the self-directed control
of productive forces, from a people. Within African
societies, as Amílcar Cabral saw, this was first of all
about land.3 Liberation also concerned what was grown
on the land: the West African economies had devoted
themselves to monocrop groundnut export, with ruinous
effects on soil fertility.4
China, Science, and National Liberation
In China, national liberation and postcolonial planning
set the stage for rethinking the agrarian question. The
Revolution linked the agrarian question to sovereign
industrialization, in an experience yet to be surpassed in
historical attempts to break from imperial oppression.
From gathering night-soil and animal waste to produce
organic fertilizer to the restoration of traditional
hydraulics systems based on earth and stone, China
linked the breaking of scientific dependency with a
form of agroecology (before the term existed) within
a national liberation framework.5 The gravitational
pull of China on peripheral thought was unthinkably
massive, like that of a mountain or the moon. Individuals
and groups in the Arab World, from economists and
agronomists to members of the Arab left and communist
parties with complex relationships to Arab nationalism,
all were beguiled by China’s example. They paid
extremely close attention to its capacity to internalize
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
knowledge and technology and to familiarize its
population with “modern” technology, including how to
repair it. In the rural sector, many students and planners
took China’s decentralized approach to the diffusion and
accumulation of knowledge seriously.
In Tunisia, China’s experience of labor mobilization
and agrarian reform inspired a coterie of young
researchers associated with the radical student group
Perspectives, including the economist Yves Younes
(1937–1996) and the agronomists Gilbert Naccache
(1939–2020) and Slaheddine el-Amami (1936–1986).
Naccache was eventually imprisoned and Younes was
forced to flee the country, but Amami escaped the
neocolonial dictatorship’s dragnet. By 1977, he became
the head of the Centre de Recherche en Genie Rural,
the main research base within the Tunisian Ministry
of Agriculture for heterodox planning approaches,
especially when it came to irrigation technology—an
axial concern in a country where ingenious techniques
for water mobilization had been central to farming for
millennia.
Amami sketched a
program for sovereign
economic development
alongside sovereign
control of technological
development, a form of
people’s science based
on a supple appreciation
of the wonders that
modern scientific
experimentation,
research, and
development could
bring to Tunisia.
35
Amami was a polymath.6 He effortlessly moved through
agronomic arenas, spiraling outwards from agronomy
into planning. Amami believed that Tunisia’s rural
poverty and underdevelopment were linked to its
scientific dependency on foreign nations. But he worked
for the state, a harsh US-aligned dictatorship whose
allotted space for Marxist thought morphed, swelled,
and shrank over time, so he was limited in his ability to
express these opinions. Sometimes, they were permitted
at the margins of universities and research institutions,
especially in the 1980s, so long as they did not directly
call for dispossessing and deposing national wealth
and power. Constricted from calling outright for a
land-to-the-peasant agrarian reform or wide-scale and
comprehensive cooperativization as in China, Amami
instead focused on technological innovation. He wanted
to shatter Tunisia’s technological dependence.
Amami’s Contributions to National Liberation
in Tunisia
Amami made three critical analytical–conceptual
innovations. He rejected the neocolonial notion of
tradition as a burden and instead considered peasant
tradition to be the organic base of popular development.
He further dismissed that of imported technologies
as superior or as a boundless boon to Tunisia. He
scrutinized them, showing that not only were they not
socially neutral, they had been implanted to further the
ends of neocolonial value extraction and exploitation.
His third innovation was to sketch a program for
sovereign economic development alongside sovereign
control of technological development, a form of people’s
science based on a supple appreciation of the wonders
that modern scientific experimentation, research,
and development could bring to Tunisia. Amami wove
together these three threads of neo-populist thinking,
placing the small peasantry at the center of his
developmental plans without directly attacking landed
power.
Let us consider each of these threads in turn. First,
the notion of tradition. Tradition refers to agricultural
knowledge built up over millennia through farmer-
based experiments and learning, against the background
of a relatively unchanging natural environment and
amidst the flows of technology and thought eastwards
from Iran and Yemen and westwards from Andalusia.
Tradition had nothing to do with ossification or so-called
“backwardness” except by the imputations of colonial
and neo-colonial powers. It was simply a catch-all term
that he had to engage in order to be able to seriously
discuss the suite of technologies and practices to which
36 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
the term referred. He knew that Tunisia, as with all
countries, had a specific technological heritage, adapted
to time, place, moisture, winds, humidity, rainfall,
and soil. Writing with colleagues Akissa Bahri and J.
P. Gachet, he said he considered peasants to be “the
one national library … conserving techniques and
knowledge” of the golden age of Maghrebi agronomy.7
Amami’s most concise statement appeared in an essay
initially published under the aegis of the Association
pour le Développement et l'Animation Rurale, a rural
development organization, and later published in a
book as part of an informal “think tank” weaving
together economists and engineers towards rethinking
development, assembled by the University of Tunis’s
first Marxist full professor, Azzam Mahjoub.8 In
the 1982 paper, Amami argued that the ideology
of “modernization” coupled with derision for the
“traditional” was in fact the intellectual expression of
the agenda of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism,
producing “unequal development,” a phrasing which he
must have taken from Samir Amin.9
Amami understood that
technologies developed
elsewhere and imposed
upon Tunisia by the
North were not socially
neutral in their effects,
not as capable of
healing as of harm.
The notion of “traditional,” he wrote, had become “a
colonial ideology favoring the supremacy of imported
technology and wanting to disown any specificity of/
to the colonized country.” Amami argued that the
reliance on these technologies would push Tunisia to
simply retread Northern development paths, towards
urbanization, industrialization, the development of a
middle class, and supposedly widespread prosperity.
In every sector they entered, these dependency-
inducing technologies dissolved and disarticulated
national production and wove it into neocolonial
developmental ambitions. Research was the keystone of
 Myles Marshall

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 37

this dependency, forging
a “gigantic technological
relay between the
exterior and the interior,”
extending to the Green
Revolution which
imposed dependence on
foreign seeds. Even more
damaging was the import
of hydraulic techniques
and technologies, which
took up an even larger
portion of the state Slaheddine el-Amami (1936–1986)
agronomic research
budget, making Tunisia
“dependent on its inputs and means of production
without being able to acquire its food independence.”
This “double agricultural dependence, downstream and
upstream,” Amami wrote, “is the most alienating of
the relationship of unequal development between the
affluent countries and the underdeveloped countries.”
The neocolonial ideology and planning perspective had
a sociocultural cognate: instilling a spirit of scientific
dependence within the minds of Tunisian people, a
molecular remolding beginning in elementary schools.
The rural exodus, the depreciation of rural life, the
number of “‘failed’ students” from the countryside, the
mechanization of hillside and fragile terrain farming
in the Center and South of Tunisia, the lack of skilled
labor in the olive sector—these were not forces of
nature like gravity but the harvest of human decisions.
Above all, this manifested in how schooling “dangled
the mirage of an urban life, getting rid of centuries
of prejudice and ‘downgrading’ in which the rural
world bathed.”10 Amami understood that technologies
developed elsewhere and imposed upon Tunisia by the
North were not socially neutral in their effects, not as
capable of healing as of harm. They were mechanisms
to perpetuate the stagnation of Tunisian economic and
technological development, precisely because their
imposition reflected the interests of their makers.
They were foisted upon Tunisia.
Appropriate Technologies
and Eco-Development
In contrast, Amami called for an entirely different
development. It quietly reflected the “basic needs”
approach to development then dominant in international
consortia. But it was radicalized, to be implemented
as part of national planning. He called for “Dispersed
housing, decentralized hydraulic infrastructure (wells)
38 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
…adapted to the mobilization and the exploitation
of renewable energy,” further arguing that these
measures would be “creators of employment.” Alongside
rationalizing soil use through land use planning, Tunisia
could double the number of people employed.11 This, in
turn, rested on a foundation of the “total Tunisification
of research,” alongside its “regionalization”: appropriate
technology meant appropriate to an ecology, a biome,
a soil structure.
Amami’s primary expertise was in water harvesting,
and accordingly the largest breadth of his writing
concerned the ensemble of water accumulation
technologies incubated in Tunisia over the millennia.12
These installations, from hillside reservoirs, to the
meskats of the Sahel, the jessour of semi-arid montane
zones, were based on intensive initial investments of
labor, deploying entirely local materials, and depending
totally on local knowledge of the contours of rainfall
and rates of runoff.13 By using a seasonally abundant
input—i.e., labor—and deploying it along with
decentralized knowledge and physically abundant earth
and stone, this “tradition” was uniquely appropriate for
a country in which availability of water for irrigation
decreased from North to South. Amami saw that such
technologies—still in use to grow almond trees and
pomegranates in semiarid zones in southern Tunisia—
could be the technological keystone of national
development planning and national liberation in the
Third World more broadly, towards integrated and
autonomous technological and social development.
Critically, Amami’s heterodoxy was neither reactionary
nor a call for stasis, but radical and an advancement of
people’s science. He called for the use of solar energy
for drip irrigation, for example, which would achieve
an appropriate level precisely because “when the solar
energy increases the quantity of water distributed
naturally increases to satisfy the hydrological needs
of the plants.”14 In another research note, he praised
the “dispersed and decentralized” character of solar
energy as uniquely suitable for wells. The natural
dispersion “of these energies,” he wrote, imposed “a
revision in the concept of rural planning.”15 This was in
turn based on his conception of peasants as more than
capable of “technological assimilation,” conditioned
on “an amelioration of the material conditions and
an alleviation of the hardship of work”: a technology
appropriate for making people’s lives better in the here
and now.
Finally, Amami called for such projects in the context
of national metallurgy industries. Indeed, solar and
wind power was viewed as a component of national
industrialization. These “workshops for repairing
the wind turbines” alongside ever-higher rates of
“integration would permit in the long run … the creation
of a non-technologically dependent national industry.”16
Sovereignty and Peasant Power
Such an appreciation of Tunisia’s historical endowments
took shape against the structure of oppression bearing
down on Tunisia, state planning, and the rural
poor. Amami’s work sought to do, using appropriate
techniques, what Tunisia and most of the South had
not been able to do using inappropriate technology: to
develop. Amami saw that such a process had to be based
on the ingenuity and capacity of the poorest and most
oppressed direct producers of the nation, and with the
state reworked into a scaffolding for decentralized and
self-reliant rural development. In this, China loomed as
the model, horizon, and dream. Amami also saw that
any such development had to be based on delinking
from the logic of the international technological system.
In this way, more than almost any other postcolonial
theorist of development, he perceived that technological
sovereignty and national liberation were intertwined,
and fundamental to the resolution of the agrarian
question in its social, economic, political, ecological, and
national aspects.17
Such lessons are not only of the past. They remain
the central components of an untrod peasant path to
development and liberation, largely untried, spurned,
and yet the only one which leads away from the
catastrophe of the present. Land, peace, and bread were
the historic banners of revolution over a century ago.
Amidst catastrophic shocks to the world food system and
calamitously unequal agrarian structures, the slogan has
not aged, either for the antisystemic movements of today
or for the revolutions of tomorrow.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Notes
1. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay, “Surveying the Agrarian
Question (Part 2): Current Debates and Beyond,” The Journal of Peasant
Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 255–84.
2. Sam Moyo, Praveen Jha, and Paris Yeros, “The Classical Agrarian
Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today,” Agrarian South: Journal
of Political Economy 2, no. 1 (2013): 93–119.
3. Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar
Cabral (Monthly Review Press, 1979).
4. Amílcar Cabral, “Para o Conhecimento Do Problema Da Erosão Do
Solo Na Guiné,” Boletim Cultural Da Guiné Portuguesa, 1954; Amílcar
Lopes Cabral, “Feux de brousse et jachéres dans le cycle cultural
arachide-mils,” Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa 13, no. 51
(July 1958): 257–68.
5. Sartaj Aziz, Rural Development: Learning from China (Macmillan
International Higher Education, 1978); Sigrid Schmalzer, Red
Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China
(University of Chicago Press, 2016).
6. See Max Ajl, “Auto-Centered Development and Indigenous Technics:
Slaheddine El-Amami and Tunisian Delinking,” Journal of Peasant
Studies 46, no. 6 (2019): 1240–63.
7. Slaheddine El-Amami, J.-P. Gachet, and Taher Gallali, “Choix
Techniques et Agriculture Maghrébine: Le Cas de La Tunisie,”
Peuples méditerranéen 8 (1979): 119–52.
8. Author interview with Azzam Mahjoub, Tunis, November 8, 2019.
9. Slaheddine El-Amami, “Pour Une Recherche Agronomique Au
Service d’une Technologie Nationale Intégrée,” in Tunisie: Quelles
Technologies ? Quel Développement ? (Éditions Salammbô: GREDET,
1982), 15–20.
10. Slaheddine El-Amami, “Technologie et Emploi dans l’Agriculture,”
in Tunisie, Quelles Technologies ? Quel Developpement, GREDET (Tunis:
Éditions Salammbô, 1983), 21–38.
11. El-Amami, “Technologie et Emploi dans l’Agriculture,” 25.
12. “Slaheddine El-Amami,” Al-Mūsū‘a al-Tūnisīyya, accessed
April 20, 2022.
13. Slaheddine El-Amami, “Changing Concepts of Water Management in
Tunisia,” Impact of Science on Society 33, no. 1 (1983): 57–64.
14. Slaheddine El-Amami, “Les Perspectives d’Utilisation de l’Energie
Solaire Dans Le Domaine Agricole En Tunisie,” Bulletin d’Information
de l’INRAT 9 (March 1978): 10–14.
15. Slaheddine El-Amami, “Elements Pour Un Plan d’Application de
l’Energie Solaire Dans Le Domaine Agricole (VIeme Plan 1981–85),”
Documentation (Tunis: CRGR).
16. El-Amami, “Elements.”
17. In the documents I have so far examined of Amami’s, he did not deal
with gender contradictions in the Tunisian countryside.
39

THE PERENNIAL
SEEDS OF ZAPATA
S I M O N P. T Y E A N D ER I C R . H AG E N
Encuentre una traducción de este artículo en español en nuestro sitio web: magazine.scienceforthepeople.org.
LAND AND LIBERTY
Industrial agriculture has increased global food
production over the past century while accruing
disproportionate economic and societal benefits for
industrialized nations. Across North America, these
benefits have primarily been achieved by increasing
production efficiencies, issuing extravagant corporate
subsidies, and engaging in widespread habitat
destruction that has transformed about half of the
contiguous United States into cropland and pasture.1
Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially after
scientific and economic developments of the early
twentieth century, the cumulative effects of industrial
agriculture have rapidly transitioned land ownership to
a visible handful of shareholders.
40 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
A Better Hell
Some of those hardest hit by mass consolidation of
agricultural production are Indigenous people who
struggle to maintain agrarian lifestyles and subsist
in modern economies. Many Indigenous resistance
movements have fought agricultural colonialism
across North America, however, few movements have
countered oppressive economic, cultural, and societal
conditions mediated by agricultural colonialism as
successfully as the Zapatista National Liberation Army
(EZLN) of Chiapas, Mexico. Under the banner of Mexican
Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata, their movement has
maintained territorial control for over twenty-eight years
without official recognition by the Mexican government
beyond the failed San Andrés Accord.2 Their movement
has also captured worldwide public attention, in part
due to writers like Homero Aridjis and Gabriel García
Márquez and bands like Rage Against the Machine that
skillfully described the formation, momentum, and
endurance of the Zapatistas to their audiences.3
We are among those who have been inspired by the
Zapatistas, both as socialists of some form who wish to
see their project of radical democracy and Indigenous
empowerment prevail, and as biologists who believe
their agricultural practices can help form sustainable
alternatives to the climate-ravaging, profit-oriented
pursuits of industrial agriculture. We are not affiliated
with the EZLN, nor do we speak for them; instead,
we wish to outline their history and agricultural
practices for those who are unfamiliar. In particular,
we believe that previous writing on the Zapatistas has
paid insufficient attention to imminent environmental
threats facing their agricultural autonomy, and we wish
to partially fill that gap.
MAIZE AND REVOLUTION
The Mexican Revolution and ensuing constitutional
reforms promised widespread land reform and
redistribution, which was primarily enacted by
government-mediated partitioning of foreign-owned
plantations into ejidos (or small cooperative farms).4
Although these government programs substantially
increased land opportunities for agrarian workers,
the revolutionary momentum waned under immense
pressure from estate owners and corporate influence
over the twentieth century. Then, in 1992, President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari amended Article 27 of Mexico’s
constitution to facilitate the dismantlement of ejidos and
rapid growth of industrial agriculture.5
This rapid privatization further impoverished Indigenous
agrarian workers across southern Mexico, who had
already struggled to grow food and build homes on their
stolen land. That same year, the Mexican government
signed the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which allowed American farmers to sell maize
below the cost of production across much of Mexico
due to extensive subsidies.6 In turn, many Indigenous
farmers were forced to give up agrarian lifestyles, and
over 100,000 would leave to work at urban factories by
the year 2000.7
After the passage of NAFTA, members of Indigenous
groups across southern Mexico, including the Tzotzil,
Tzeltal, Tojolab’al, and Ch’ol, rejected neoliberal tyranny
across North America and revolted against the federal
government. Rather than kneel on Zapata’s spilt blood,
the EZLN declared territorial independence and began
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
forming autonomous communities in central and eastern
Chiapas. Today, the Zapatistas maintain tenuous, semi-
peaceful relations with the Mexican government, and
about half of Chiapas comprises the Rebel Zapatista
Autonomous Municipalities where “the people rule and
the government obeys.”8 They have since expanded their
territory to encompass forty-three communities, where
they educate people, expand human rights of historically
excluded groups, maintain agricultural independence,
and peacefully persist amidst unabated globalization.9
These community-based goals are often implemented
through regional schools, which, unlike state-sponsored
schools, provide educational opportunities for both
children and adults in native languages.10
While community education and outreach are key to the
Zapatistas’ enduring persistence, another key element of
their empowerment has been their focus on agroecology
and sustainable community-owned farming. We believe
that agricultural and other biological scientists have
paid insufficient attention to how Indigenous knowledge
can help form sustainable alternatives to industrial
agriculture. In particular, we believe that weaving
Indigenous knowledge into mainstream scientific
inquiries can simultaneously increase the sustainability
of food systems, reduce the use of environmentally
destructive agricultural practices, and promote local food
autonomy across societies. We hope this case study about
the Zapatistas encourages discourse about the benefits
of radical agricultural practices and growing costs of
industrial agriculture.
MAIZE AND PERSISTENCE
Maize has been a dominant crop in the Americas since it
was domesticated in south-central Mexico around nine
thousand years ago. The cultivation of maize also led to
the development of the milpa system, a slash-and-burn
farming method that is low-intensity and may even help
ameliorate regional deforestation. In milpa systems,
multiple crops are grown simultaneously for around two
years, then left fallow for several years before subsequent
use.11 This innovative system preserves topsoil and
prevents excessive erosion, which are critically
important in the nutrient-poor highlands of Chiapas.
Milpas include diverse compositions of crops, such
as maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, and peppers, that
are intentionally arranged to form intricate symbiotic
relationships. Specifically, these crop arrangements allow
squash leaves to shade the ground and retain moisture
on rainfed farms, as beans fix nitrogen in the soil and
climb sturdy corn stalks without additional structural
41
support. Collectively, this forms a small agroecosystem
that conserves resources, repels common pests without
synthetic chemicals, and limits habitat destruction.
These polycultures and regenerative agricultural
methods are a far cry from the acres of monocultures
that now dominate the once Great Plains and their
fertilizer runoff that has made part of the Gulf of Mexico
uninhabitable for most marine life.12
Defenders of industrial agriculture often argue that
milpas produce lower yields than industrial farms,
and thus they cannot be used along with other small-
scale or organic practices to feed billions of people.
But this is actually a matter of fierce debate: the
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates
about 75 percent of farms worldwide are the size of
an average city block, and small diversified farms
have been estimated to produce two to ten times as
much food per acre as large monocultural farms.13
Moreover, beyond being a more sustainable food system,
milpas also strongly reaffirm the Zapatistas’ food
autonomy. For example, if the EZLN wished to engage
in monoculture-style farming, they would become
economically dependent on companies like Bayer that
sell highly-integrated networks of herbicides, pesticides,
fertilizers, and hybrid seeds. These hybrid seeds must
be repurchased annually at exorbitant prices to avoid
lawsuits for copyright infringement and may interfere
with the use of native maize seeds due to interbreeding
or gene introgression.
These worries are not unfounded, as a gene present only
in genetically modified (GM) maize was found to have
introgressed into native varieties of maize in Oaxaca
in 2001, soon after Mexico banned imports of US maize
used for human consumption.14 Indeed, despite the
Zapatistas’ early victories against industrial agriculture,
they have been increasingly faced with agricultural
colonization through maize homogenization. These
fears have been realized for other small farms across
North America, with companies such as Monsanto
(which has since been acquired by Bayer) having filed
over ninety lawsuits and spending about ten million
dollars annually to prosecute farmers that infringe on
hybrid seed patents.15 Such oppressive litigation tactics
and financial penalties would be insurmountable for
Indigenous groups.
In response, Schools for Chiapas—a nonprofit
organization that provides educational and building
assistance to remote regions of the state—and the
EZLN began working with ecologist Martin Taylor
to develop the Mother Seeds in Resistance Project.
This program created a seed bank to protect regional
42 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
agrobiodiversity, began genetic testing to preserve
native maize varieties, and is part of a growing number
of Indigenous seed sovereignty initiatives created to
protect heirloom varieties around the world, including
the Anishinaabe Seed Project and the Indigenous
Seed Sovereignty Network.16 While non-Indigenous
movements against GM organisms have largely focused
on more controversial claims of health risks, the
Mother Seeds of Resistance Project is an anti-colonial
and ecological project that preserves the autonomy
of agrarian farmers and rejects the environmentally
destructive practices of industrial agriculture.
CLIMATE AND NATURE
However, regardless of whether the Zapatistas are able
to preserve native maize diversity, all maize varieties
are expected to experience detrimental climate change
over coming decades that will reduce crop yields. For
example, both native and hybrid maize varieties that
have relatively high yields over consecutive years
are strongly affected by environmental stressors
compared to varieties with low yield stability.17
Under an optimistic perspective, standing genetic
variation within native maize could provide selective
breeding opportunities for adaptations, such as
increased yield stability, that may be beneficial under
future climates. Even so, sustained increases in the
concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide are
expected to decrease the nutrient content of most crop
plants due to energetic trade-offs. Without substantial
global cooperation to mitigate future climate change,
environmental degradation will exacerbate nutrient
deficiencies already experienced by the global poor,
including the people of Chiapas.
In southern Mexico, climate change is expected to
primarily manifest in the forms of increased mean
annual temperature and precipitation variability,
as well as increases in the frequencies of droughts
and floods during critical growing seasons.18 These
increases in environmental variability may profoundly
impact regional maize production and potentially
result in mass crop failures during extreme years
because most regional farms are rainfed rather than
irrigated.19 If realized, these extreme environmental
conditions may also cause a suite of less predictable
negative feedbacks that additively or synergistically
diminish regional maize yields. One prominent
example is that heavy rainfall can cause nitrogen to
leach from soils, especially in regions with limited
topsoil with low nutrient content such as the highlands
of Chiapas.
Yet, while climate change has become the focus of
global change activism, habitat destruction is an oft-
overlooked element of the global environmental crisis.
For example, Chiapas harbors some of the richest
biodiversity across Central America but experienced one
of the highest global rates of deforestation during the
1970s and 1980s.20 In total, about half of the Lacandon
Jungle was destroyed between 1975 and 2000.21 Regional
deforestation has been driven by cattle ranching, natural
resource extraction (such as a ten-fold increase in land
used for palm oil production since the enactment
of NAFTA), and human population growth.22 These
economic pursuits for regional resources extend beyond
the land, with major corporations such as Coca-Cola
extracting over 300,000 gallons of water daily. In the
neighboring town of San Cristobal, inhabitants have
greater access to soft drinks than pure water, which
has eroded local health conditions.23 Collectively, these
circumstances unequivocally threaten the land, water,
and forests that Emiliano Zapata and other Mexican
revolutionaries fought and died for.
Merely acknowledging
Indigenous knowledge
is insufficient and,
instead, we must include
Indigenous researchers in
the production of science.
AUTONOMY AND CAMARADERIE
The case of the Zapatistas is one of many Indigenous
communities that are adamantly combating
environmental degradation caused by the remnants
of colonialism and the rise of neoliberalism. From the
Standing Rock protests and other movements for water
sovereignty, to northeastern Ecuadorians filing a class
action lawsuit against Chevron for poisoning their
people through oil spills, to Oceanic nations that beg the
international community to abandon fossil fuels so their
islands don’t disappear, it is clear that some of the most
powerful movements against environmental destruction
are led by Indigenous people. Amplifying their voices
and knowledge is imperative to combat global change
and enact global reform to include diverse community
members as decision-makers and shareholders.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
As scientists, we can counter the erasure of Indigenous
peoples and work to build more sustainable global
agrosystems by removing barriers between scientists,
agrarian farmers, and Indigenous people. This idea is
not new, and was notably proposed by biologists and SftP
veterans Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. Indeed,
Indigenous agricultural systems have been studied by
anthropologists and other theorists but largely ignored
by agriculturalists and biologists in favor of industrial
techniques, despite a few exceptions. Moreover, such
biases have materialized as the deep entrenchment of
agricultural corporations across American universities.
In general, scientists across fields need to increasingly
consult and attribute Indigenous knowledge, as well as
other knowledge from outside academia, to facilitate
scientific progress. For example, Richard Levins
frequently invoked the case of Cuban meteorologist
Fernando Boytel, who incorporated knowledge of wind
patterns from charcoal workers to make a more accurate
wind map of Cuba’s Oriente province. Beyond regional
environmental conditions, Indigenous knowledge can
also greatly increase biodiversity and conservation efforts
across agricultural landscapes by promoting transitions
toward low-intensity farming methods and reducing
the use of synthetic fertilizers and other pollutants.
However, without substantial funding increases for
Indigenous researchers, particularly those that focus on
enriching and understanding their cultures, such as the
Mother Seeds for Resistance Project, calls to incorporate
Indigenous knowledge will not empower autonomous
research. Merely acknowledging Indigenous knowledge
is insufficient and, instead, we must include Indigenous
researchers in the production of science. Thankfully,
there is a growing list of innovative, scientific methods
and practices that include Indigenous people and share
their perspectives.24
Outside of science, we can all assist the Zapatistas,
in particular by donating to Schools for Chiapas,
buying their native maize, and advocating against
the violence they face. Soon after their revolution,
militants supported by the Mexican government
brutally murdered forty-five members of a Tzotzil
pacifist organization Las Abejas in the village of Acteal.
Also during this time, more than 115,000 people were
displaced from Chiapas due to generalized violence.25
The Mexican government has inadequately addressed
these conflicts about farmland, religion, and political
power, while Indigenous people continue to endure
rampant food insecurities. More recently, drug cartels
have expanded their presence in Chiapas, which
previously had relatively low narco-violence compared
to greater Mexico. Last year, members of the Jalisco
43
New Generation Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel fought on the
streets and left several dead.26
We strongly suggest scientists across fields increasingly
attribute, study, and use Indigenous knowledge while
also advocating for their self-empowerment and
persistence. If we do not, we would be knowingly
complicit in furthering the very environmental
colonialism that led to the Zapatista Revolution and
oppression of Indigenous people worldwide. We also hope
that scientists who read this piece will think critically
about how to use their work to support Indigenous
movements like that of the Zapatistas and spread
word of their struggles. Future inclusion efforts across
science and society must extend beyond offering short
seats to tall tables and include greater considerations of
radical perspectives. To start, please consider donating
to Schools for Chiapas and planting your own Seeds of
Resistance in solidarity with and in economic support of
the Zapatistas. ¡No país sin maíz!
Notes
1. Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby. “Here’s How America Uses its
Land,” Bloomberg, July 31, 2018.
2. Nicholas P. Higgins, “Mexico’s Stalled Peace Process: Prospects and
Challenges,” International Affairs 77, no. 4 (October 2001): 885–903.
3. Tom Hayden, The Zapatista Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/
Nation Books, 2002); Rage Against The Machine, Evil Empire, Epic
Records, 1996.
4. T. R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1995), 540.
5. James J. Kelly, “Article 27 and Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy of
Zapata’s Dream,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 25 (1993–1994):
541–570.
6. George A. Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello, Basta!: Land and
the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2005).
7. James D. Plourde, Bryan C. Pijanowski, and Burak K. Pekin,
“Evidence for Increased Monoculture Cropping in the Central United
States,” Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment 165, no. 15, (2013):
50–59; Nancy N. Rabalais et al., “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia, A.K.A.
‘The Dead Zone’,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33 (2002):
235–263.
8. Associated Press, “Zapatista Rebels Extend Control Over Areas in
South Mexico,” ABC News, August 19, 2019.
9. Subcomandante Insurgente Moises. “Communique from the
Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee,” General Command
of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, August 17, 2019, ; Marisa
Brandt, “Zapatista Corn: A Case Study in Biocultural Innovation,”
Social Studies of Science 44, no. 6 (2014): 874–900.
10. Leanne Reinke, “Globalisation and Local Indigenous Education in
Mexico,” International Review of Education 50 (2004): 483–496, .
11. S. Ochoa-Gaona, “Traditional Land-Use Systems and Patterns
of Forest Fragmentation in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico,”
Environmental Management 27, no. 4 (April 2001): 571–86.
12. Plourde, Pijanowski, and Pekin, “Evidence for Increased
Monoculture Cropping”; Rabalais et al., “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia.”
44 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
13. High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE), Investing in Smallholder Agriculture
for Food Security (Rome: Committee on World Food Security, 2013);
David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2007), 159.
14. Brandt, “Zapatista Corn.”
15. Center for Food Safety, Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers, January 3, 2005.
16. Tania Aguila-Way, “The Zapatista ‘Mother Seeds in Resistance’
Project: The Indigenous Community Seed Bank as a Living, Self-
Organizing Archive,” Social Text 32, no. 1 (2014): 67–92; Reinke,
“Globalisation and Local Indigenous Education.”
17. A. T. Mastrodomenico et al. “Yield Stability Differs in Commercial
Maize Hybrids in Response to Changes in Plant Density, Nitrogen
Fertility, and Environment,” Crop Science 58, no. 1 (2018): 230–241;
Carolina Ureta et al, “Maize Yield in Mexico Under Climate Change,”
Agricultural Systems 177 (2020): 102697.
18. Götz Schroth et al., “Towards a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy
for Coffee Communities and Ecosystems in the Sierra Madre de
Chiapas, Mexico,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
14 (2009): 605–625.
19. Rodrigo G. Trevisan et al., “Multiyear Maize Management Dataset
collected in Chiapas, Mexico,” Data in Brief 40 (2022): 107837.
20. Rhiannon Elms, “Mexican Coffee Production Continues to Rebound
from Coffee Rust Disease,” USDA Foreign Agricultural Information
System, May 31, 2019; Eduardo Mendoza and Rodolfo Dirzo,
“Deforestation in Lacandonia (Southeast Mexico): Evidence for the
Declaration of the Northernmost Tropical Hot-Spot,” Biodiversity and
Conservation 8 (1999): 1621–1641.
21. Luis Cayuela, José María Rey Benayas, and Cristian Echeverría,
“Clearance and fragmentation of tropical montane forests in
the Highlights of Chiapas, Mexico (1975-2000),” Forest Ecology and
Management 226 (2006): 208–218.
22. Richard E. Bilsborrow and David L. Carr, “Population, Agricultural
Land Use and the Environment in Developing Countries,” in Tradeoffs
or Synergies? Agricultural Intensification, Economic Development, and
the Environment, ed. D. R. Lee and C. B. Barrett (Wallingford, UK:
CAB International, 2001); Héctor B. Fletes-Ocón and Alessandro
Bonanno, “Responses to the Crisis of Neo-liberal Globalization
State Intervention in Palm Oil Production in Chiapas, Mexico,”
International Journal of Society of Agriculture and Food 20, no. 3 (2013):
313–334; David L. Carr et al., “A multilevel analysis of population
and deforestation in the Sierra de Lacandon National Park, Peten,
Guatemala.” Documents D’analisi Geografica 52 (2008): 49–67.
23. Oscar Lopez and Andrew Jacobs, “In Town with Little Water, Coca-
Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes,” The New York Times, July 14, 2018.
24. Saima May Sidik, “Weaving Indigenous Knowledge into the
Scientific Method,” Nature 601, no. 7892 (January 2022): 285–87.
25. Redacción Yessica Morales, “Chiapas suma 37 desplazamiento
forzados desde 1994; más de 115 mil personas desplazadas,”
Chiapasparalelo, June 3, 2020.
26. “Cartel Territorial Battles Escalate in Chiapas as CJNG Attempts to
Muscle in,” Mexico News Daily, July 12, 2021.
 CONTRIBUCIÓN DE LOS
CAMPESINOS Y CAMPESINAS:
CASO VENEZUELA
H
Read an English translation of this article at magazine.scienceforthepeople.org.
istóricamente, las
corporaciones agrícolas,
químicas y alimentarias,
en complicidad con los
gobiernos regionales en
diferentes niveles, han
modelado e implementado diferentes
tácticas para dejar de lado a los
campesinos, campesinas e indígenas:
desalojos de grandes cantidades
de sus tierras originales, guerras,
acciones terroristas promovidas
por las oligarquías. La influencia de
las corporaciones trasnacionales y
la corrupción gubernamental son
solo algunas de las fuerzas que no
permiten a nuestros campesinos su
estabilidad social y política.
A pesar de estas condiciones
existentes, dificultades y de
los riesgos asumidos, nuestras
campesinas y campesinos continúan
produciendo la mayoría de los
alimentos del mundo. Destacamos el
caso de Venezuela, un país que vive la
aplicación de centenares de sanciones
y medidas coercitivas unilaterales,
las cuales han generado un bloqueo
económico y financiero, pretendiendo
MIGUEL ÁNGEL NÚÑEZ
asfixiar el pueblo venezolano, el que
ha respondido con una significativa
producción agroalimentaria.
Los campesinos al nivel
global
A nivel global, nuestros
campesinos y campesinas producen
aproximadamente entre el 55 por
ciento y el 75 por ciento de los
alimentos básicos del mundo.1 Otro
informe actualizado confirma que
son los campesinos y campesinas—no
las corporaciones alimentarias—
quienes alimentan al mundo. El 70
por ciento de la población mundial
se alimenta de la red alimentaria
campesina.2 Además, en comparación
con la agricultura corporativa,
utilizan solo el 25 por ciento de los
recursos hídricos y energéticos.
Estas cifras de producción primaria
de alimentos de nuestros campesinos
y campesinas reflejan un espacio
socio-productivo donde la producción
agroecológica de alimentos se hace
notar y avanzar. Resaltamos el hecho
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
de que al menos el 75 por ciento de
los 1.500 millones de campesinos,
campesinas e indígenas cultivan sus
alimentos sin agroquímicos.3
Progresivamente la agroecología
se consolida como una ciencia
emergente agrícola que nos está
presentando reales opciones técnicas
para contener los embates provocados
por las consecuencias del cambio
climático y la pandemia del Covid-19,
secuela de la crisis eco-social
mundial. Frente a esta extrema y
actual condición eco-sanitaria global,
la agroecología es la única opción
científica y viable productivamente.
Nos brinda dos condiciones vitales:
el alimentarnos diariamente y
sanamente, y el mantener una salud
óptima. Estos dos procesos no pueden
detenerse en nuestras vidas, son
necesarios para mantener una salud
equilibrada, alimentándonos de
forma segura, sana y nutritivamente.
A nivel mundial, la agroecología
se ha ido posicionando como
una herramienta importante
en universidades e institutos de
45
 Sophie Standing

46 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
investigación. Algunas de las
organizaciones que reconocen
la vigencia de sus postulados
científicos incluyan IPES-Food
(International Panel on Sustainable
Food Systems), IFOAM (Organics
International), y Agroecology in
Europe.4 Como lo han expresado
estas instituciones, debemos
centrar las políticas alimentarias y
agrícolas en la agroecología como
estrategia principal, para lograr
autonomía y resiliencia, poder
transformar rápidamente las formas
en que producimos y consumimos
alimentos, y al mismo tiempo
abordar los desafíos globales, incluido
el cambio climático.5
Desde nuestro entender, la ciencia
agroecológica es una matriz
que unifica todos los saberes:
los agrícolas originarios, los
indígenas, campesinos-familiar,
afrodescendientes y nos permite
reafirmar, que la agroecología, nace
del saber popular y tiende a fortalecer
las distintas tendencias científicas
agrícolas con el saber con ciencia
campesino.
Saber con ciencia
Es evidente que las reflexiones
sobre las modalidades en los
distintos paisajes agrícolas de
trabajo de nuestros campesinos y
campesinas—las múltiples funciones,
estrategias y prácticas agrícolas
ejecutadas—nos están generando
una serie de conocimientos y
sabidurías que debemos tomar en
cuenta. Aprendizajes, que apuntan a
soluciones de problemas productivos
específicos, a la diversidad de
agro-alimentaria que se produce
entre sus asociaciones de cultivos
y sus necesidades nutricionales y
gastronómicas. Todas estas acciones
que todavía encontramos en nuestra
vida campesina, son un buen
caudal y sumas de conocimientos,
que combinan diversos saberes
surgidos de una sabiduría popular,
comunitaria, social y cultural.
Esto en parte es lo que abarca el
conocimiento de lo que ocurre en el
día a día de nuestros campesinos y
campesinas. Allí surge lo que siempre
se ha denominado saber empírico, es
decir, basado en la experiencia y en
los hechos; es esa sabiduría andante,
la que se ha venido transmitiendo
socialmente.
No ha podido existir
una co-evolución
de nuestras
agriculturas
originarias sin las
relaciones
de lo social
con lo ecológico y
lo ecológico
con lo social.
Por lo cual entendemos el
saber con ciencia de nuestros
campesinos y campesinas;
como los procesos de permanente
creación de conocimientos que
vienen interpretándose en su
propia y particular manera, en
la imaginación teórica integrada
con la práctica. Es una especie
de sabiduría andante, donde se
conjugan los modos tradicionales en
que los seres humanos han vivido
y se han sostenido durante siglos,
con las apropiaciones adecuadas
de las innovaciones tecnológicas,
para recrear sus sistemas vitales e
integrarlos a los distintos valores
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
de nuestra interculturalidad. Este
saber con ciencia agrícola surge
como respuesta a las demandas
de la producción territorial,
comunitaria y local que fortalece los
valores culturales y comunitarios,
cumpliendo y llenando las
múltiples necesidades de vida con la
trascendencia espiritual de la familia
campesina.
Agroalimentación y
agrobiodiversidad
Este saber con ciencia de nuestros
campesinos y campesinas se expresa
en las centenares de prácticas
agrícolas que se han sustentado sobre
las bases de nuestras sociedades y
sus interacciones con sus ambientes
específicos. No ha podido existir una
co-evolución de nuestras agriculturas
originarias sin las relaciones de lo
social con lo ecológico y lo ecológico
con lo social. Las prácticas agrícolas
tradicionales igualmente alimentan,
y se alimentan de, diferentes
prácticas culturales. La diversidad
de diferentes manifestaciones
culturales (religiosas, danzas,
artesanías) constituye en la máxima
expresión ideológica y cultural de
nuestros pueblos. La diversidad
cultural latinoamericana se ha
legitimado por la diversidad de
prácticas originarias agrícolas
que todavía tenemos en nuestras
regiones y que las encontramos en
nuestras asociaciones de cultivos o
policultivos.
En las agriculturas mexicanas y
centroamericanas, las chinampas y
milpas; en las andinas, las chacras;
en el Caribe tropical, los konucos,
de morichal o pantano, de vega o de
playón, y sus diferentes expresiones
productivas de los llanos, las sabanas.
En la zona del Amazonas en las
tantas etnias indígenas, todavía
se encuentran las agriculturas de
roza, migratoria, e intensivas y de
subsistencia.
47
 arar y trabajar la tierra, con el uso
o no de animales; el uso óptimo
Chinampas: espacios de terreno de poca extensión con una estructura de o de las pendientes; el aprovechar la
superposición de piedras, cañas, bambú, y otras de tierra donde se cultivan especial condición del territorio, sus
principalmente vegetales y flores, proviniendo de las culturas azteca y microclimas y la mejor distribución
maya. de agua; el mejoramiento genético
y la adaptabilidad de las semillas;
Milpas: agroecosistema mesoamericano y centroamericano de las culturas asociación y arreglos de cultivos
mayas, aztecas, toltecas y otras, donde se destacan por asociar los cultivos más adecuados; uso de las fases de la
de maíz, auyama, frijoles, chiles y la incorporación progresiva de otros luna; know-how sobre regímenes de
cultivos permanentes y semi-permanentes, como tubérculos, frutales, precipitación; aplicación de técnicas
plantas medicinales y aromáticas. específicas y sus limitaciones; uso de
plantas para curar otras plantas; y el
Chacras: granjas o espacios con arados y sistemas de riegos apropiados, mutualismo biológico entre las raíces.
para establecer una intensiva asociación de cultivos o policultivos de maíz, Todos estos conocimientos tienen
quinua, frijoles, ajíes, la diversidad de tubérculos , hortalizas, frutales, sólidos fundamentos científicos, sin
medicinales y aromáticas, proviniendo de la cultura quechua. embargo, han sido subestimados por
la academia e instituciones afines, y
Konucos: espacios de la familia campesina caribeña, andina, llanera, no se valoran lo suficiente.
y amazónica, donde se prepara el terreno, con el uso y manejo de las
eco-tecnologías, para la siembra de cultivos asociados o policultivos, Estos saberes y prácticas agrícolas
liderizados por el maíz, frijoles y auyama, y de acuerdo a las condiciones merecen ser debidamente
climatológicas. reconocidos, ya que han
fortalecido muchos conocimientos,
principalmente el manejo de
Entre estas modalidades se destacan de suelos, que favorece la producción policultivos y asociaciones de
las expresiones y arreglos de la de diferentes productos agrícolas en cultivos, abarcando áreas de la
asociación de cultivos, dando diferentes épocas del año. agroecología, como la recuperación
testimonio de esta diversidad de suelos; manejo integrado holístico
agroalimentaria y de las prácticas Entre nuestras montañas y en de plagas y enfermedades de los
agrícolas de nuestros campesinas y los diferentes pisos altitudinales cultivos; selección y siembra de
campesinos, las cuales se adaptan a encontramos andenes, prácticas de semillas; y diferentes procesos de
recursos naturales y agroecosistemas terraceo, y aterrazamientos de los resiliencia ante la crisis climática,
específicos. suelos en nuestros konucos andinos. entre otros. Todo este conocimiento
Así mismo, los konucos se encuentran integrado es bien dinamizado por los
en laderas, en el fondo de los valles, distintos arreglos de las asociaciones
Los campesinos y la en planicies con actividades agrícolas de cultivos, las cuales nos
agrobiodiversidad en en tierras inundables, características demuestran los nexos y relaciones
Venezuela de sabanas extensas, planas, llaneras existentes entre los diferentes entes
y de selvas, donde percibimos las y fenómenos biológicos, químicos
En Venezuela registramos 462 prácticas de agroforestería y de y físicos, los cuales sirven de
plantas y especies agroalimentarias agricultura mixta con ganadería fundamento para que ambos saberes
(entre plantas aromáticas, cereales, vacuna y huertos frutales extensos. (empírico y científico) se integren
colorantes, condimentos, cortezas, En todas estas modalidades se han e irrumpan un nuevo devenir en la
especias, estimulantes, frutas, utilizado diversas prácticas tales ciencia agrícola nacional.
hortalizas, legumbres, granos, como: cultivos de coberturas, abonos
semillas y raíces y tubérculos) verdes, asociación de cultivos o Nuestros millones de campesinas
que las otorgan al país, una policultivos, rotación de cultivos, y campesinos, siguen haciendo
gran biodiversidad territorial en prácticas de cosechas de agua, y de agricultura en diferentes
condiciones edafo-climatológicas conservar suelos y otras tecnologías modalidades y estilos, sin el uso de
(suelos-climas) la segunda en América populares y apropiadas. agroquímicos porque han estado
Latina después de Colombia.6 aplicando principios y estrategias
Situación geo-política, la cual le Estas tantas enseñanzas están agroecológicas. Estamos obligados a
confiere a Venezuela una variabilidad vinculadas a diversas formas de conocer cómo abordar, sistematizar

48 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
sus prácticas y verlas aplicadas
en nuestros espacios de trabajo.
Allí encontramos sabidurías
y conocimientos, que nos han
proporcionado toda una serie de
consideraciones científicas, las
cuales fortalecen y vinculan el
conocimiento de los agricultores con
la ciencias agrícolas, demostrándonos
contribuciones justas, oportunas y
valiosas para los procesos agrícolas y
productivos.
La histórica
alianza científico-
campesina se
orienta y promueve
el saber con ciencia,
como respuesta
a las demandas
de la producción
agrícola
territorial,
comunal y local.
Saber con ciencia en
Venezuela
El Ministerio para Ciencia y
Tecnología de Venezuela promueve
la alianza entre el mundo científico
formal y el campesino y la
campesina. La ministra, Gabriela
Jiménez, ha presentado una
propuesta de «comunalización»
de la ciencia, es decir, llevar la
ciencia formal directamente a las
comunidades y organizaciones
populares.7
La Ministra Jiménez impulsa una
alianza científica-campesina, la
cual está agilizando y desarrollando
iniciativas y prácticas que mejorarán
no solo la producción agrícola, sino
también las formas de producción de
semillas y distintos cultivos. La idea
principal de esta alianza es que tanto
los procesos productivos formales
como los informales, se alimentan
entre sí y también comiencen a
aprender unos de otros.
Al día de hoy, más de 3.500 familias,
como parte de 124 núcleos, forman
parte de la alianza científico-
campesina en Venezuela. Están
ubicados en trece de los veinticuatro
estados venezolanos. Hasta el
momento han logrado avances
sustanciales en la producción
de semillas de estos cultivos,
en la aplicación de principios
agroecológicos y en lograr que las
poblaciones circundantes sean
autosuficientes con estos alimentos
básicos.
La histórica alianza científico-
campesina se orienta y promueve el
saber con ciencia, como respuesta
a las demandas de la producción
agrícola territorial, comunal y local.
Además de la principal demanda de
transferir las tecnologías y propiciar
el intercambio de semillas entre
konuqueros y comunidades, se
plantean avanzar en los procesos
de transición de la producción
agroecológica nacional. Para ello,
se da seguimiento y participación
activa en varias acciones estratégicas
referidas al impulso del plan konuco
y de la agroecología, de la Gran
Misión Agrícola de Venezuela.8
Al momento de elaborar estas
reflexiones, los investigadores
del Observatorio Venezolano de
Economías Populares nos refieren
a varias investigaciones en trece
estados; beneficiándose 287.241
familias, quienes han logrado
producir 189.866 toneladas de
alimentos.9 Para finales del 2019,
El Programa Todas las Manos a la
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Siembra en 22 estados venezolanos
había logrado organizar 14.403
konucos escolares; entre 1.359
instituciones educativas y formando
86.964 personas.
Por otra parte, Venezuela cuenta
con más de 100.000 Ha cultivadas
agroecológicamente.10 Muchas
de estas hectáreas derivan de
experiencias de konucos agrícolas
socioproductivos urbanos y
familiares. Resaltamos otra
significante experiencia venezolana
de la organización Pueblo a Pueblo,
quienes por seis años consecutivos,
vienen suministrando a 170 familias
3.500 Toneladas de alimentos sanos,
frescos y a precios por debajo del
mercado.11
Conclusiones
Para nadie es un secreto que nuestra
querida Venezuela, en los últimos
seis años, viene confrontando una
compleja situación de guerra proxy
no convencional e híbrida con
atentados terroristas y agresiones
de todo tipo, donde nos han
aplicado medidas coercitivas y
bloqueos financieros internacionales
(incluyendo a empresas privadas)
lo cual ha contribuido a una
desestabilización de la economía.
A ello agregamos las distintas
precariedades que nos ha traído la
pandemia del Covid-19. Con todo,
lo que más podemos argumentar,
es que el pueblo venezolano le ha
demostrado al mundo su capacidad
de resistencia, en defensa de la
soberanía nacional y su manera digna
de persistir y avanzar en diferentes
frentes socio-productivos.
Uno de nuestros sectores más
importantes es la producción
primaria de alimentos, que no se
ha detenido durante la pandemia.
Reafirmamos que más del 75
por ciento de los alimentos que
se producen en Venezuela son
49
consumidos por los venezolanos, lo

nuestros campesinos y campesinas nos

cual representa una extraordinaria
ventaja, pues significa que en las
severas condiciones de guerra
híbrida en la que nos encontramos, ayudan a transitar hacia una nueva
la producción de alimentos no se
detiene, ni desiste en continuar
agricultura, donde se promueve el cambio
avanzando y mejorando. Estas
condiciones de la producción
de paradigma de conocimientos agrícolas
campesina de alimentos se perciben impuestos, como parte de los procesos
de descolonización que hoy día estamos
como naturales, adecuadas y
fundamentales, estratégicamente,
para la guerra de resistencia y el
enfrentamiento con las diferentes confrontando.
contingencias.

Todo lo anteriormente expuesto nos

Notes
indica que nuestro sector campesino
1.
nacional, además de proveer nuestros
alimentos de la dieta básica nacional,
2.
también nos provee de todo un
3.
cúmulo de saberes en ese saber
4.
conciencia que anteriormente hemos
descrito. 5.
Nuestro saber conciencia nos ayuda,
6.
alienta y enseña a liberarnos de
las secuelas ideológico-político- 7.
científicas colonialistas agrícolas
que nos han querido imponer.
“¿Quién nos alimentará? - Preguntas sobre la crisis climática y alimentaria, 2009,” Grupo ETC,
November 16, 2009.
“Who Will Feed Us?,” ETC Group, October 15, 2017.
“¿Quién nos alimentará?”
See “Agroecology Definitions,” Agroecology Info Pool, accessed April 25, 2022.
Miguel A. Altieri and Clara Nicholls, “Agroecology: Challenges and Opportunities for Farming
in the Anthropocene,” International Journal of Agriculture and Natural Resources 47, no. 3 (December
29, 2020): 204–15.
Hernán Cano, “‘Pueblo a Pueblo’: el plan popular para combatir la falta de alimentos en
Venezuela,” Sputnik Mundo, 2021.
"Ministra de Ciencia: Promover el conocimiento materno es una forma de construir paz,"
Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela, Ministerio del Poder Popular para Ciencia y Tecnología, 18
de marzo, 2022.

Hoy día, con dignidad y decoro, 8. Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela, Gran Misión AgroVenezuela (Caracas, Septiembre 2020).
nuestros campesinos y campesinas 9. Consulta personal al Dr. Mario Sanoja, Caracas, Venezuela.
nos ayudan a transitar hacia 10. “ONCTI - Noticias,” accessed April 26, 2022.
una nueva agricultura, donde se 11. Cano, “‘Pueblo a Pueblo’”.
promueve el cambio de paradigma de
conocimientos agrícolas impuestos,
como parte de los procesos de
descolonización que hoy día estamos
confrontando.

Ha llegado el momento de comenzar

a reconocer, resignificar, revalorizar
y validar los múltiples aportes que
nuestros campesinos y campesinas
le siguen brindando al mundo, para
la construcción de otra civilización
posible.

50 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 By Edward Millar and Cliff Conner
Heading for the
Last Roundup
The Saga of Glyphosate and
What It Means for the GMO
Science Wars
In 1962 the publication of a book entitled Silent Spring
touched off a revolution in the way many humans of the
industrial age perceive our place in the natural world. The
book helped accelerate the worldwide environmentalist
movement and forced a thoroughgoing reconsideration of
the role of science in human affairs.
Its author, Rachel Carson, warned that the massive
modern use of pesticides and other synthetic chemicals
to produce food poses a serious threat to humankind
and, ultimately, to the continued existence of life on
Earth. Although her intended message was not explicitly
anti-capitalist, by linking an impending environmental
crisis to the blind drive for profits by agribusiness and
the chemical industry, Silent Spring issued a fundamental
challenge to the capitalist mode of food production.
Not surprisingly, the industries she targeted launched
a ferocious counterattack against her book.1 That assault
was a major catalyst of bitter scientific disputes that
continue to afflict the public discourse in the United
States.
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
From DDT to Glyphosate
Silent Spring alerted the world to the dangers
of one particular chemical pesticide:
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. Although
its use was banned in the United States in 1972,
other hazardous agricultural chemicals have rapidly
proliferated and efforts to regulate them have not
generally been successful. Today, the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) lists tens of thousands of
industrial chemicals that fall under the jurisdiction of
the Toxic Substances Control Act, fewer than one percent
of which have been independently tested for safety
(much less in combinations).2 Unfortunately, the EPA’s de
facto guiding principle is that a substance is safe until
proven unsafe, so the untested remainder are designated
GRAS—“Generally Regarded As Safe.”3
The inadequacy of the regulatory agencies’ enforcement
of safety standards leaves the public with only the courts
as protection against dangerous industrial chemicals.
51
 Jordan Collver
"From the day
Glyphosate, Monsanto, Roundup, and GMOs
genetically engineered Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s (now

crops were introduced, Bayer AG’s) popular weed killer brand-named “Roundup.”
As “the most heavily used agricultural chemical in

they were designed history,” glyphosate demands special attention.5 Another

major reason why the chemical is central to current
controversies over agricultural science is its place at the
with one primary heart of the dispute over genetically engineered crops.
The safety of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs,
purpose in mind—to ranks among the most vociferously debated issues in the
public understanding of science and public engagement

withstand treatments in science governance.6 The massive global market for

genetically engineered Roundup-Ready crops reveals how

of glyphosate" glyphosate is inextricably linked to questions about GMO

safety. Investigative journalist Carey Gillam explains:

Shadowing the controversy over genetically

— Carey Gillam
But environmental lawyer and activist Carol Dansereau
compares her twenty-eight years of experience defending
the public from pesticides and other toxins to playing
Whack-a-Mole: “No matter how many times we whack
problems down, others pop up to take their place.”4
Among the tens of thousands of potential chemical
hazards, a few have gained notoriety and name
recognition; and one stands out above all the others in
that regard: glyphosate.
modified organisms (GMOs) is what I believe to be
the true health and environmental calamity of
modern-day biotech agriculture—the flood across
our landscape of the pesticide known by chemists
as glyphosate and by the rest of us simply as
Roundup. From the day genetically engineered
crops were introduced, they were designed with
one primary purpose in mind—to withstand
treatments of glyphosate… Then and now, most of
the genetically modified crops grown in the world
carry the glyphosate-tolerant trait.7

52 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
That “glyphosate-tolerant trait” is the key to
understanding how Monsanto came to dominate not only
the agricultural chemicals market but also the global
market for crop seeds. By contractually linking its weed
killer to its seeds, Monsanto gained an enduring pipeline
of multibillion dollar profits from combined sales of
seeds and herbicide.8
An Extremely Clever Technological Gambit
The backstory is fascinating. During the American war
on Vietnam, Monsanto was the US military’s leading
supplier of Agent Orange, a defoliant consisting of the
chemicals 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T. Initially claiming that
the herbicide posed no threats to human health, the
company became embroiled in lawsuits and controversy
when it was discovered that Agent Orange contained
the toxic substance dioxin. By the 1970s, the company
was eager to rebrand. After introducing Roundup in 1974,
Monsanto reaped superprofits from the monopoly its
patent provided. But Monsanto’s patent was due to expire
in the year 2000, and the company rued the thought
of having to share its golden goose with competitors.
Monsanto’s scientists devised an ingenious technological
solution to the problem. They would genetically engineer
new breeds of Roundup Ready
crops that could withstand the herbicidal effects of
glyphosate.
Whereas cumbersome, labor-intensive methods of
herbicide application had previously been necessary,
Monsanto’s new GMO seeds provided a seemingly
miraculous one-step process that would kill the weeds
but spare the crops. “Use of glyphosate has skyrocketed
in the past twenty years,” Gillam explains:
Monsanto introduced glyphosate-tolerant soybeans,
corn, canola, sugar beets, and other crops, linking
its new crop technology to its older chemical agent.
Genetically engineered alfalfa, a common food
for livestock, is also regularly doused with
glyphosate now.9
Farmers loved Roundup. Glyphosate was a singularly
effective weed killer, and Monsanto promoted Roundup
as far safer for human health than all previous
herbicides. Roundup proponents have coyly hinted that
although drinking Roundup is not recommended, it
probably would not damage human health.
But—and there is always a “but”—if Monsanto’s safety
claims seemed too good to be true, it is because they
were not true. The brilliant technological gambit
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
utilizing transgenic techniques to create glyphosate-
immune crops has a literally fatal flaw: it kills people.
The Case of Dewayne Johnson
As a groundskeeper for a California school district,
Dewayne “Lee” Johnson would outfit himself in
protective equipment before strapping on his spray tank
backpack and heading out to douse the schoolyards with
a mix of Roundup and another Monsanto glyphosate-
based herbicide, Ranger Pro. Although Johnson was
skeptical of claims that the weed killer was safe enough
to drink, he was reassured by the company's messaging
and not initially concerned about a workplace accident
that left him soaked in the foamy mixture. Months
later, scaly lesions started to appear on his body; and he
was diagnosed with mycosis fungoides, a rare type of
a suite of cancers known collectively as non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma (NHL).
Johnson started to wonder about a possible connection
between his cancer and his accident, and he called a
Monsanto company hotline to ask whether this was a
known risk of working with these weed killers. He didn't
hear back from the company, and he continued his
groundskeeping work until a second accident resulted in
the same herbicide mixture leaking down his back and
neck. With his condition worsening, Johnson contacted
a law firm that had posted an advertisement seeking
plaintiffs for a mass tort case against Monsanto.
Johnson's case, as the first lawsuit to allege that
occupational exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides
could have fatal consequences, has received singular
attention in the media; but his story is only one of many.
As of March 2022, Monsanto had been confronted with
more than a hundred and thirty thousand lawsuits from
plaintiffs charging that its weed killers had caused them
to develop NHL and other cancers. Elias de la Garza, a
migrant farmworker and landscaper living in Texas,
pinpoints exposure to Roundup as the cause of his NHL.
Jack McCall, a farmer who died of NHL in 2015, was a
self-identified “hippie” who stayed healthy and avoided
all pesticides—except for Roundup, which he was led to
believe was “as safe as table salt” in marketing materials
that advertised its exceptionally low toxicity.
Farmworkers and landscapers are not the only people
who claim a link between their worsening health
conditions and Monsanto’s pesticides. As the daughter
of migrant farmworkers, Joselin Barrera believes that
growing up in an environment where Roundup was
used regularly is the reason she developed NHL at age
53
24. Sofia Gatica, a working class mother who lived near
the soybean farms of Ituzaingó, Argentina, formed an
anti-pesticide advocacy group after her daughter died
of kidney failure. Gatica, who has been threatened
at gunpoint and told to “stop messing with the soy,”
believes that the indiscriminate spraying of glyphosate
on GMO soy fields in Ituzaingó “is a hidden genocide,
because they poison you slowly and silently.”10
Monsanto did indeed
have knowledge of
evidence that exposure
to Roundup can
cause a number of
deadly diseases, most
notably non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma.
Although Lee Johnson and the others would not know
this until much later, Monsanto did indeed have
knowledge of evidence that exposure to Roundup can
cause a number of deadly diseases, most notably NHL.
In the past thirty years, the rate of NHL has increased
globally, with farmers facing elevated risks of this type
of cancer. Researchers working with data collected by
the National Cancer Institute on farmers with NHL in
the United States heartland discovered possible links
between NHL and glyphosate, while a 2001 Canadian
study also found that frequent use of glyphosate was
associated with a higher risk of this specific form
of cancer. NHL is far from the only health concern
regarding glyphosate; a French regulatory agency
summarized others: “genotoxicity, long-term toxicity
and carcinogenicity, reproductive/developmental
toxicity and endocrine disrupting potential.”11
Junk Science
Rather than mobilizing its scientific resources to
investigate the toxicity problem and try to resolve
it, Monsanto chose instead to cover it up with a
vigorous campaign of denial. It followed the tobacco
54 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
industry’s playbook by manipulating scientific studies
to manufacture doubt about the claims of its critics.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans continued to be
exposed to Roundup and many many undoubtedly
suffered and died unnecessarily.
The early studies indicating links between glyphosate
and NHL were alarming, but inconclusive. That
glyphosate posed a significant risk of cancer in humans
was not a consensus view, and the company exploited the
climate of doubt to promote studies that took a favorable
view of glyphosate as authoritative.
In 2015, a prestigious United Nations–affiliated health
agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer
(IARC), designated glyphosate as “a probable carcinogen
in humans,” and “found a particular association
between glyphosate-based pesticides and non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma.”12 When the IARC issued its findings, the
group’s credibility posed a significant public relations
problem for Monsanto.
Monsanto’s denials that it knew about the potential
dangers of glyphosate have been proven false by evidence
that has come to light in recent years when public-
interest litigators took the company to court and gained
access to its internal communications.
Email communications from Monsanto staff revealed
how the company launched a massive behind-the-scenes
campaign to discredit the IARC and its allegations.
Tipped off by the EPA before the IARC published its
findings, Monsanto quickly began working on counter-
messaging about the product’s classification as a likely
carcinogen. The company’s chairman made public
statements smearing the scientists as meddlesome
activists peddling politically motivated “mischief” and
“junk science.”13 The company planned to spend over
$200,000 on a public relations campaign to discredit
the IARC, working with agrochemical industry lobby
groups to write letters to officials at the World Health
Organization and regulatory agencies around the globe.
“Cozy” only begins to describe the relationship between
Monsanto and the regulators. The company’s internal
communications indicate that a telephone conversation
took place between a Monsanto employee and an EPA
scientist, Jess Rowland, during which Rowland told
Monsanto that he would help to block a planned review
of the evidence concerning glyphosate’s safety. Rowland
was also asked by Monsanto if he would help the agency
“correct the record” about the IARC study and was
sent documents to guide the EPA’s responses to media
inquiries.
Email communications also reveal how Monsanto’s chief even maintained dossiers keeping close watch on the
of regulatory science, toxicologist William Heydens, musician Neil Young after he released his 2015 album
explained to his colleagues how “ghost-writing” research The Monsanto Years.14
articles for leading scientific journals works: they could
pay nominally independent scientists to “have their GMOs: “Generally Regarded As Safe”?
names on the publication,” but Monsanto would actually
be “doing the writing” and the authors “would just edit The scientific establishment in the United States has for
[and] sign their names, so to speak.” Heydens’ emails many years embraced the essential safety of GMOs as an
suggest that ghost-writing is not an atypical strategy for article of faith, and has tried to dismiss GMO opponents
handling the company’s as fringe elements akin to
public relations concerns, creationists and climate
and they go on to identify Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, change deniers. That
Cancer, and the Corruption of Science
some prominent research (Island Press 2017) 320 pages
attitude had been bolstered
papers that were written by the official pro-GMO
by Monsanto employees or The award-winning positions of the premier
affiliates. Notably, at least investigative journalist organizations of American
one ghost-written paper Carey Gillam has written scientists—the National
has been cited by the EPA two books on glyphosate Academies of Science,
as compelling evidence safety and the corruption of Engineering and Medicine,
attesting to Roundup’s risk assessments, and has and the American
safety. This was but one of extensively covered this issue Association for the
several ways the company for the environmental justice outlets Undark and Advancement of Science.15
corrupted science to defend US Right to Know. Whitewash provides an account
its profits in disregard of of the growing body of evidence that points to the However, the story of
public health. manifold harms that glyphosate poses to human glyphosate reveals the
and environmental health, drawing from decades of degree to which the science
The length to which research (much of which has only been made public behind risk assessment
Monsanto would go to spin through leaked documents), as well as interviews is corrupted by corporate
the science and influence with farmers, scientists, former government interests, and the extent
public perception about employees, and activists. The Monsanto Papers, of the collusion between
the safety of their products Gillam's follow-up, zeroes in on a landmark court regulatory agencies and the
is evidenced by their case that took place in California in 2018, the first of companies they regulate.
efforts to discredit the thousands of similar lawsuits The EPA, United States
journalist Carey Gillam. filed on behalf of American Department of Agriculture,
Following the publication landscapers, farmworkers, and United States Food
of her book Whitewash and their families who alleged and Drug Administration
in 2017, a spreadsheet that Monsanto failed to warn have all been criticized for
circulated online with them of glyphosate's dangers. maintaining a “revolving
details about Project door” relationship
Spruce, the name given The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, between industry and
to Monsanto's campaign Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s regulators, with Monsanto
against her. Tactics included Search for Justice (Island Press 2021) employees moving
352 pages
manipulating search engine back and forth between
results to amplify negative leadership positions
reviews of her book, at the company and
engaging regulatory agencies to counter her claims, and government appointments. A probe from the United
drafting scripts and talking points for company-friendly States Government Accountability Office found that
“pro-science third parties.” Further reporting uncovered between 2006–2007, EPA scientists drafted thirty-
the existence of the company's “internal intelligence two chemical risk assessments; following political
fusion center” with a “team responsible for the collection interference, only four of them were entered into the
and analysis of criminal, activist/extremist, geo-political agency’s Integrated Risk Assessment System program.
and terrorist activities affecting company operations Published interviews with EPA scientists suggest a
across 160 countries,” including analysts monitoring climate of fear, intimidation, and meddling from
“physical, cyber and reputational risk.” The company agribusiness lobby groups like CropLife International,

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 55

which donate millions of dollars to electoral campaigns
for Congressional members who sit on relevant
subcommittees.
The leaked internal Monsanto documents remind us
that the science of glyphosate safety is only “unsettled”
because it has been continually and deliberately
blocked. It is an example of agnotology, the deliberate
manufacture of ignorance as a strategy to keep the
science unsettled.16 For instance, the EPA does not
study the risks of exposure to Roundup, only its active
ingredient. But farmworkers, landscapers, and others
whose work requires them to use herbicides do not use
glyphosate in isolation; they use it in commercial mixes
which also contain surfactants like polyethoxylated
tallow amine (POEA) and antifoam compounds. Those
working with formulated commercial herbicides lack
any meaningful safety data about the products they use,
and some research suggests that combining glyphosate
with other chemicals can intensify health risks.
These gaps in glyphosate risk assessments should
be situated in relation to a broad context of the
“structural ignorance” produced by public authorities
and governing bodies responsible for tracking and
regulating links between chemical agricultural
treatments and environmental health. In California,
the regulatory framework for surveilling occupational
pesticide hazards systematically underreports
poisonings experienced by farmworkers. The state's
Pesticide Illness Surveillance Program (PISP) relies on
a passive risk assessment procedure based on forecasts
rather than actual results, and implicitly frames
workplace pesticide poisonings as the outcome of
discrete accidents, human error, or farmworkers' failure
to follow safety protocols. In adopting this paradigm,
which assumes that pesticides are safe if used
correctly, the PISP puts the onus on workers to disclose
“accidents” to their employers. Undocumented migrant
workers experience even greater difficulties challenging
both their employers and the state about workplace
safety issues, resulting in even larger knowledge gaps
about pesticide risk. In such a data-poor environment,
it is easier for corporations to exert pressure on
regulatory agencies and to tilt regulations to favor
their interests.
A Prolonged Battle
As previously noted, the only recourse for those
harmed by exposure is through the courts. At first
glance, Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto Company reads like
a success story. In 2018, the jury sided with Johnson
56 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
and awarded him the full compensation sought by his
legal team: $39.2 million in compensatory damages and
$250 million in punitive damages. The verdict also came
at an inopportune time for Monsanto, which was then
negotiating a $64 billion sale of the whole company to
Bayer, the German pharmaceutical corporation.17
After the verdict, Monsanto immediately filed a motion
to appeal the judgment. The judge upheld the verdict,
but reduced the punitive damages owed to $78 million.
Further appeals have prolonged the process; and
although they have all sided with Johnson, the appeals
process has further reduced the sum of his settlement
to $20.5 million, which he eventually received in late
2020. After paying out his legal fees, Johnson ended up
with $10 million, a sizable sum that has allowed him to
cover the medical treatments keeping him alive, but a far
cry from the initial $289.2 million settlement that made
headlines in 2018.18
In 2018, the Bayer acquisition was completed. The
Monsanto name was officially retired, but products
like Roundup and Ranger Pro remained on the shelves
without warning labels. Facing tens of thousands
of other plaintiffs who had filed lawsuits over the
carcinogenicity of Roundup, in 2020 Bayer agreed to
pay between $10.1 and $10.9 billion to settle almost
a hundred thousand of the claims. The company
threatened to file for bankruptcy if it could not stop the
Roundup litigation. The company has thus been dealt a
substantial, but nonfatal, financial blow by the courts.
However, the revelations of its duplicity and the proven
dangers of the chemicals have deeply affected Bayer’s
ability to convince the public and regulatory agencies
worldwide of the safety of their products, and have
opened the door for continued legal suits in the future.
Bayer’s multibillion
dollar payout is a
tacit admission of
glyphosate’s culpability
in causing NHL, which
completely undermines
the American scientific
establishment’s
longstanding refusal
to confront the issue of
GMO safety.
In July 2021, Bayer announced that starting in 2023 it
would phase out the sale of Roundup for residential
use, but that the product would remain available for
agricultural use. Despite settling almost one hundred
thousand Roundup lawsuits, the company continued to
insist that no scientific evidence proves its herbicides to
be carcinogenic. Perhaps most troubling is that the EPA
continued to support its claim that glyphosate doesn’t
cause cancer.19
Conclusion
Bayer’s multibillion dollar payout is a tacit admission
of glyphosate’s culpability in causing NHL, which
completely undermines the American scientific
establishment’s longstanding refusal to confront the
issue of GMO safety. The carcinogenicity of a chemical
that is so closely linked to the main category of
transgenic crops is too blatant to be ignored due to the
extent of exposures.
The evidence of the danger that Roundup poses
to workers, and of the corruption of science by
corporate influence, solidifies the case that oversight
of agrochemicals and GMOs alike must be governed
by the precautionary principle, which requires that in
instances of “unsettled” science, we must err on the side
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
of public and environmental health, rather than on the
side of profit margins for multinational agribusiness
conglomerates.20 Furthermore, regulatory agencies must
have the power to not only issue directives, but to enforce
them. Toothless safety regulations are worthless.
There has been a tendency for some on the left to cede
the issue of health and safety to GMO proponents, or
to downplay the importance of worker and consumer
safety in relation to the broader fight against capitalist
agribusiness. As one example, Richard Lewontin argued
that GMO safety is the “wrong target,” and that the
true dangers of transgenic modification come from the
escalation of capital-intensive industrial agriculture
across the planet.21 The evidence about the links between
glyphosate and NHL should cause us to reassess the
assumption that safety can be considered independent of
political economy, especially in cases where genes have
been modified to encourage exponential increases in
the application of a harmful herbicide. Questions about
environmental health and safety of GMOs should not
and cannot be disentangled from the political economy
critiques of agriculture under global capitalism. Framing
concerns about GMO safety as consumer battles waged in
the grocery store aisles diverts attention from the threats
to both the worker and the soil. Agricultural workers
and landscapers face the greatest risk from a regulatory
system designed to balance health concerns against
economic ones, weighted strongly in favor of profit.
Growing evidence about the emergence of superweeds
and the threats to pollinators add further urgency to
the need to redesign the global food system according to
fundamentally different principles and practices. Global
agriculture must be de-commodified and reconstructed
based on the philosophy of agroecology, which resists
resource-intensive approaches like monocropping,
pesticides and genetic engineering, and instead treats
farming as the nurturing of complex and mutually
beneficial ecological relations.
Notes
1. John M. Lee, “‘Silent Spring’ is Now Noisy Summer,” The New York
Times, July 22, 1962,
2. Clifford D. Conner, The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to
Trump (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 87–88.
3. See Sheldon Krimsky, “The Unsteady State and Inertia of Chemical
Regulation Under the US Toxic Substances Control Act,” PLoS Biology
15, no. 12 (December 2017): e2002404.
4. Carol Dansereau, What It Will Take: Rejecting Dead Ends and False
Friends in the Fight for the Earth (CreateSpace, 2016), 349.
5. See Douglas Main, “Glyphosate Now the Most-Used Agricultural
Chemical Ever,” Newsweek, February 2, 2016.
6. See Brian Wynne, “Creating Public Alienation: Expert Cultures of
Risk and Ethics on GMOs,” Science as Culture 10, no. 4 (2001): 445–481.
notes continue on page 80
57
 FEAR OF
A BLACK PLANET:
ARCHIVAL NOTES
J U S T I N DAV I S

“See if you grew up where we Much of my political life has involved environmental
justice—I’ve worked in neighborhoods with toxic water
grew up in this environment / basins, where signs sprout up urging you not to fish;

you’d see we’re not the I’ve gone to city council meetings countless times about
shoddy public transit service; I’ve watched my friends
product, we’re the product fight against landfills, push for better parks, and expose
soil contaminated by decades of military dumping. I’ve
times ten.” learned intimately how greenspace and infrastructure
fall back on a racial logic that people often don’t see.
But this isn’t about that. This is about how the land has
—Cavalier always held identity inside it. How power is something
you live in, something that traps heat inside it, that
churns the sky above your head and makes you wonder
“You can plan a pretty when lightning might strike.

picnic, but you can’t

“ALL THE CROPS EXCEPT NEGROES ARE
predict the weather.” INJURED”

Let’s start where Gossett’s tweet does, or more precisely,

—André 3000 before it: in the life of slavery.

The project of chattel slavery demanded its own

Blackness as the field. Blackness as the harvest.
Blackness as toxin, as invasive species.
I recently read a tweet from writer and archivist Che
Gossett that’s been lodged in my brain stem ever since:
“living in the afterlife of slavery means living on the
planetary afterlife of the plantation.”1 What I hope to
do here is dredge up some pieces of that afterlife: places
where we can see the innate ecology of Blackness, ways
that America’s environmental crisis has always been a
crisis of racial hierarchy.
American landscape, one designed to hold as much
latent wealth as possible. The plantation was its basic
unit. Throughout the nineteenth century, the biggest
plantations ballooned to hold massive crop yields, crowds
kidnapped through the legal and illegal slave trade,
and generations of selective breeding. The country’s
slave population and its farmland grew in tandem: in
1860, slaves were over 40 percent of the population in
almost half of the Southern states,2 and “the average,
owner-operated farm in the US South and border states
comprised well over three hundred acres.”3 So the fate of

58 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 Sophie Standing

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 59

the plantation and the fate of Black people were always
tied together—tied by the fate of the South’s white
landowning class. When Mississippi seceded from the
United States in 1861, its declaration of secession made
clear what the plantation’s survival meant to them.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution
of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.
Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far
the largest and most important portions of commerce
of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate
verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law
of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the
tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the
world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and
civilization.4
It’s striking how ecological this reasoning is: a “law of
nature” binds the Black body to slavery. Repeatedly,
slavery’s defenders argued that only Black people could
handle the heat and humidity that plantations required.
Africa’s climate sets up Black folks to bear the weight of
the Southern economy. But the declaration goes further:
it argues that the tropical conditions shared by Africa
and the Americas keep civil society functioning and hold
up the economy in the broadest sense of the word. If
you disconnect Blackness from the plantation, you risk
making the whole planet fall apart.
In his 2019 book Necropolitics, political theorist Achille
Mbembe tells us a little about the process of forming
plantations, “about cutting down, burning, and routinely
razing forests and trees; about replacing the natural
vegetation with cotton and sugar cane.”5 While Native
Americans were being pushed off their homes, unwilling
or unable to do the free labor that colonizers wanted,
60 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
countless Africans were brought in to terraform, to
“[replace] an ecosystem with an agrosystem.”
But the context in which Mbembe brings this up is
important. It’s incomplete to see the plantation as only
a place where Black folks had to work, eat, and sleep.
The plantation shared a common birthplace with Black
identity itself—both were being created at the same time.
“Here, life came to be shaped according to an essentially
racial principle,” says Mbembe, “race, far from being a
simple biological signifier, referred to a worldless and
soilless body, a body of combustible energy, a sort of
double of nature.”6
At a certain point, the internal conditions of slaves—
their health, the physical and mental toll on their
lives—couldn’t be separated from their surroundings:
the air, the weather, wildlife, microbes, and crops. And
this connection between race and the plantation has
another side: Black labor in the South has changed its
environment long term. It’s interesting how Mbembe
argues that plantations made the Black body a “soilless
body” when one of the most common side effects of
plantation farming was soil erosion. Growing tobacco
could exhaust a field in just three or four years, as a lack of
nutrients in the soil could turn it acidic, and the constant
scratching at the surface could make considerable dips
in the landscape.7 Cotton farmers had to rotate their
fields with other crops to avoid this, and groups of
slaves stepped over and through them frequently to kill
bollworms and dig up weeds. Literary scholar Monique
Allewaert distills this in her book Ariel’s Ecology when
she says that “Plantation spaces possessed those who
traversed them.”8
The summer after I graduated high school, I tracked
down the land my ancestors were forced to work on.
My family’s always kept a deep connection to the town
in Missouri’s bootheel where my great-great-great-
grandparents lived; sometime in the late 1800s, they built
our family home there from scratch, cutting stone slabs,
planting peach trees and wells in the soil. I had made day
trips there before to shop with my mom and grandma and
visit my cousins who lived on the same street where the
house once stood. But this time, my mom and I went to
the county archives and asked about the slave owners my
grandma had named for us. We watched volunteers bring
out boxes of documents that belonged to them: a will, a
tombstone order, receipts for taxes and vaccinations, and
repairing a buggy. The one that stuck to me the most,
though, was an inventory, dated October 1861, scrawled
in a loose cursive: “One tract of land containing fifty acres.
One tract of land containing one hundred and sixty one acres.
Esther, Addison, Robert, Van Buren, Caroline, Charles, Nancy,
Alexander.” My family, other families too, and sprawling
fields, all counted together.
So Blackness was a seed to
be planted, a shoot to be
cut down and regrown. It
was a natural resource to
be harvested: like tobacco,
like sugar, like the cotton
that juts out of the east
Arkansas plains like teeth as
I drive down highway 55.
I’m reminded of a newspaper clipping from the 1850s,
cut from a book of one of Frederick Douglass’s speeches.
It has no author or date, nothing to give it a concrete
origin. It reads simply: “A belated snow-storm has
just paid the interior of South Carolina a visit. It is
thought that all the crops except negroes are injured.”9
So Blackness was a seed to be planted, a shoot to be
cut down and regrown. It was a natural resource to
be harvested: like tobacco, like sugar, like the cotton
that juts out of the east Arkansas plains like teeth as
I drive down highway 55. The American pastoral has
always had a certain violence lying under the grass,
not far beneath our shoes—it’s hard for me to look at a
Romantic landscape, for example, without considering
the conquest that let white painters see it. But what I’m
saying is that Blackness is also the grass. It’s the field that
the grass is growing into, the one your heel presses down
on without thinking about it.
In 1921, a few days before Christmas, US congressman
James Benjamin Aswell, native of Vernon Parish,
Louisiana, was in D.C., fighting tooth and nail against an
anti-lynching bill.
Aswell contended the bill, if passed, would increase
lynchings, “by leading the criminal to believe he would
escape speedy death.” The only way to stop assaults, he
declared, “is to let the negro know that when he is captured
he will meet certain and immediate death.”10
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
Aswell’s argument is rife with doublespeak: he claims
that lynchings would go up if they had more legal
repercussions, and he uses both criminal and negro
to describe the average lynching victim. He not only
presumes that Black victims are typically criminals, but
asserts that Blackness itself is criminal, that the “justice”
of a lynching is always a kind of racial justice. So rather
than tell white people not to lynch, Aswell says, simply
remind Black people that they can be killed at any time:
his proposed solution was to make assaulting a woman
punishable by death, and “provide that the local courts
must pass the death penalty 24 hours after the assaulter
is caught.” Aswell reveals something that scholars like
Saidiya Hartman might call fungibility: this quality that
makes Black folks interchangeable in the white gaze, like
stalks of corn, like grains of rice mingling in a breeze.11
He collapses every lynched body into one guilty Black
man, a set of bones as soon as he’s named by a crowd.
Ultimately, past the Civil War, the plantation model may
have been unsustainable for a host of reasons, natural,
economic, social, and political—but it transformed into
sharecropping and tenant farming, systems where the
Black worker still owned practically nothing, and was
tied to the field by debt. All three systems rested on the
same basic premise: the dirt needs Black fingernails, and
the white planter controls both.
END OF PART I
This is a three-part particle published in series.
Visit magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
for more information.
Notes
1. Che Gossett (@autotheoryqueen), “Living in the afterlife of slavery
means living on the planetary afterlife of the plantation,” Twitter,
August 31, 2020, 11:37 a.m.
2. United States Census Bureau, 1860 Census: Statistics of the United States,
Including Mortality, Property, Etc. (Washington, 1866).
3. Martin Ruef, “The Demise of an Organizational Form: Emancipation
and Plantation Agriculture in the American South, 1860–1880,”
American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 6 (May 2004): 1365–1410.
4. “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify
the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.”
Avalon Project, Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library,
accessed April 25, 2022.
5. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2019), 10.
6. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 10.
7. Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 50.
8. Monique Allewaert, Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and
Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), 33.
notes continue on page 80
61
organizing reports

SftP Canada Archive Digitization Working Group

Canadian scientific institutions have been complicit in the
dispossession of Indigenous lands by resource extraction
companies, and have engineered environmental racism
that has poisoned water in places like Grassy Narrows,
Attawapiskat, Lucasville, and Pictou Landing Nation. Canada
has one of the largest mining industries in the world, and
its mining companies are major funders of science, steering
scientists towards research that maximizes colonial resource
extraction. There is an urgent need for scientists in Canada
to fight the complicity of institutions that advance settler-
colonialism and austerity capitalism—and to promote
radical science that builds anti-colonial and anti-capitalist
alternatives.
After holding small monthly meetings over the past year,
SftP Canada held its first general meeting virtually on
February 24, 2022, which was attended by fifteen members
from Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Ottawa. This pan-
Canadian chapter has formed to respond to the growing
struggles that radical scientists from coast to coast to coast
are engaged in, and to connect and organize us. We are
currently holding biweekly virtual meetings discussing articles
from SftP magazine. We launched a website that includes our
statement of values.
By Gail Robson
We are a team of volunteers across SftP chapters working
to digitize the legacy of SftP magazine by uploading all the
original magazine articles to our fully searchable online
platform. To date we have published Volumes 2–11 (1970–
1979) on archive.scienceforthepeople.org and are working
on formatting and publishing articles of Volume 12–21. This
project is building on the work of the team that previously
digitized PDF’s for the 2014 SftP Conference at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst.
We organized three archive digitization orientations this year
to bring new volunteers onto the project and we are working
in the background on building reading guides and syllabi to
make engaging with the content more accessible.
We can always use more volunteers! If you are interested
in joining the working group and want to dive into this
repository of radical science history, contact archives@
scienceforthepeople.org.

Our current plans are to act as a study group, a knowledge-

sharing hub, and a point-of-contact for those interested in
organizing local actions, forming city-based local chapters,
and creating new working groups. Recognizing the shared
challenges specific to our settler-colonial state, we see a need
to work collectively both inside institutions and on the streets.
We plan to hold teach-ins, nature interpretation walks, and
outdoor social events over the summer. We are currently
reaching out to existing groups and community efforts
who share our values in order to create a broad network
of activists. We are also planning to facilitate some public
training and community-led science outside of establishment
institutions.

Check out our website at sftp-canada.org and reach out

through the contact form (or via sftp.canada@gmail.com)
if you’re interested in connecting with us.

62 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 REVIEWS
Aesop’s classic fable, “The Ant and
the Grasshopper,” tells a story
about the perils of shortsightedness
and irresponsibility. While the
grasshopper is inclined to rely on
natural resources available today,
the ants plan their actions long-
term and diligently prepare for an
uncertain season to come. In the
2021 documentary that borrows its
name from the cautionary childhood
tale, Raj Patel and Zak Piper
reinterpret the fable for a conflict-
ridden world faced with rapidly
warming climate and compounding
challenges to produce sustenance on
scorched earth for a growing global
population.
Anita Chitaya with her family in Bwabwa, Malawi (Photograph: Kartemquin Films)
By Nadine Fattaleh and Calvin Wu
Ants Against
the Grasshopper
The main character and narrator of
the film, Anita Chitaya, a member
of the Soil, Food and Healthy
Communities (SFHC) organization
based in Bwabwa, Malawi, at first
appears as the quintessential subject
of Western developmentalism. Her
image may bring to mind donor
reports supporting neoliberal,
market-oriented interventions in
Sub-Saharan Africa along the lines
of the Green Revolution. However,
The Ants and the Grasshopper rejects
the tyranny of international aid
formulas to modernize farming;
instead of bearing witness to the
triad of poverty, patriarchy, and
powerlessness, it inverts the narrative
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
and confers agency to the people.
The film follows Anita (along with
her colleague Esther, founder of
SFHC) on a journey to the United
States, where they meet farmers,
activists, and elected officials to
discuss the lived experience of
climate change amongst subsistence
farmers from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Beseeching a life facing threats of
drought and famine, Anita insists in
her travels on one central message:
“If you want someone to change,
you go to their doorstep with your
problem—because they will be unable
to ignore you.”
The problem Anita wishes to bring is
simple: the United States emits 15.2
metric tons of CO2 a year per capita,
compared to Malawi’s 0.087.1 Anita
and the SFHC have already adopted
simple and innovative technologies,
from sustainable intercropping to
fuel-efficient stoves that prolong
firewood burns. Looking at the jet
flying across the sky, she knows that
to alleviate climate change, she needs
to convince America to take action.
As Anita arrives in the United States,
the sepia tones that dominate the
visual aesthetic of village life in
Malawi give way to landscapes
of high modernist farming. The
characters encountered throughout
the journey are anything but
static stereotypes of liberal
63
environmentalism. The film features
neither yoga-practicing advocates
of universal veganism, nor Silicon
Valley bros serving silver-bullet
solutions to the climate crisis
between hamburger buns. The cast
is grounded in material production,
from small and mid-sized family
ranches in Wisconsin, to large-scale
industrial operations in Iowa, to
Black urban farms in Detroit, to
community kitchens in segregated
communities of Oakland, California.
Anita's first world interlocutors
embody diverse contexts of the
capitalist agricultural system.
The film’s staging of the unequal
worlds, developed-underdeveloped,
North-South, core-periphery,
contrasts with Anita’s quip: “We
should be able to sit down and talk
about this.” The desire for dialogue
constantly generates a process of
translation, of seeing diverse realities
of the climate crisis in ways that
allow for the coming together of
similar experiences. On encountering
the machinery of capital-intensive
agriculture, Anita is entranced by a
tractor that tends to one thousand
acres and whose cost exceeds
five times Anita’s anticipated life
earnings. Yet, operating at vastly
different scales, workers on heavily
irrigated and mechanized farms
and their counterparts cultivating
rainfed crops by hand share one
danger whose descriptor requires
no translation: debt. Debt is an
objectification of the systemic force
of capital (the true villain of this
film) that undermines the successes
of Anita’s journey.
Here, the audience witnesses
another inversion. Because their
farming practices have been more
fully reorganized according to the
logic and dynamics of industrial
agriculture, the US farmers turn
out to be more powerless than their
counterparts in Malawi. Not for the
willful dismissal of climate reality,
64
Anita Chitaya with director Raj Patel (middle) and Malik Yakini of D-Town Farm, Detroit, MI
(Photograph: Kartemquin Films)
nor callousness in the face of Anita’s
pleas, they entreat, “What are we to
do?” From paying off loans for the
heavy machinery, to spraying ever
more ineffectual Roundup to rid
crops of pests, to working in a coal
power plant to compensate for profit
loss from organic farming, the US
farmers face a stark conflict between
their desire to heal the earth and
the boundaries set by the capitalist
food system. Some eventually make
limited lifestyle changes; others
resort to prayer. The entrenchment
of people under the reproduction
of capital limits individual choices,
removes human agency, shatters
imagination, and sabotages change.
Yet, Anita remains unfazed and
insists that the journey is “not in
vain.” Her optimism and hope have
a complicated origin. In her youth,
she was forced into marriage. Against
all odds under a highly patriarchal
society, she gradually changed her
husband's worldview and created a
community for women’s collective
empowerment. While her past
success in teaching for change
reinforces her present conviction,
it is also worth noting how hope
can flourish in times of desperation,
whether against patriarchy or
climate change.
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Indeed, the message of hope becomes
more pronounced as Anita arrives in
Oakland, California and joins Black
organizers in a community food
kitchen. Amidst tent cities, polluting
mills, and dilapidated neighborhoods,
Anita brings the audience to the
realization that not everyone in
America is helplessly trapped. The
people “who have no choice but to
fight” have been fighting all this
time. The community kitchen draws
from lessons of the Black Panther
Party, working with local farmers
to provide healthy, home-cooked
meals to undernourished people in
their community. Likewise in rural
Maryland, a historical heartland of
white supremacy,2 Black farmers
form cooperatives and seek to re-
establish their severed connection to
land. In Detroit, under the watchful
eyes and violent arms of the police,
Black residents set up urban farms
to not only tackle food insecurity in
their impoverished neighborhood
but demonstrate the potential of
regenerative harvesting.
At this point, it is abundantly
clear who are the ants and who is
the grasshopper. The ants cannot
wait for change; they don’t need
to be convinced of the urgency of
confronting the climate crisis.
The grasshoppers are neither certain
nations or individuals but the system
itself, which destroys communities
all over the world. The shared lived
experience of oppression bonds Anita
and her various hosts together and
kindles the light of international
solidarity. While the film does not
explicitly offer prescriptions for a path
forward—and trails off to an unseen
meeting with an elected official in
the US government—it displays an
array of localized mobilizations with
inspiring personal and community
transformation. This is a heartfelt
tour-de-force; the film’s rare quality,
in its emphasis on grassroots
organizing, draws the audience
toward direct action. As it turns out,
the purpose of Anita’s journey
transcends the naivete of “talking
about the problem.” Anita presents
a mirror allowing us to see that the
solution is already present among
the people. Instead of moralizing
the problematics of helpless Third
World victims in need of saving, The
Ants and the Grasshopper recaptures
the revolutionary agency of the
oppressed.
Mainstream climate narratives
typically unfold according to a few
standardized scripts. Some construct
a catastrophist formula in which
the warming planet seems beyond
human capacity for intervention.3
Others contain clearer imperatives
but forward plot lines that tout
ethical consumption or corporate
responsibility, reinforcing faux
individualist solutions.4 Patel and
Piper do not escape the mainstream
tropes completely. Their positive
portrayal of local and organic farming
leaves the audience defenseless
against ongoing cooptation and
systemic subsumption.5 The backdrop
of patriarchy and feminism in
Malawi also requires a much deeper
historical and political understanding
lest the audience falls prey to cultural
relativism.6 And the contrast of
“different worlds” ignores the
active process of globalization and For further reading
imperialism as the prima facie causes
of uneven geography.7 Nevertheless, The Red Nation, The Red Deal:
the core messages of urgency, Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
solidarity, and hope are gravely (New York: Common Notions, 2021)
needed in our present conjuncture. 176 pages
One of the timeless qualities of fables Max Ajl, A People's Green New Deal
is their clarity in reflecting the (London: Pluto Press, 2021) 224 pages
human condition. They plant seeds in
our consciousness. Then, to cultivate
the seeds of social change, we hope
that the audience takes action upon
viewing the film.

Notes
1. Emission data in 2018. See “CO2 Emissions (metric ton per capita): 1990-2018,” The World Bank.
2. Brian Palmer, Sam Weber, and Connie Kargbo, “Maryland reckons with a Violent, Racist Past,” PBS News Hour, June 19, 2021.
3. Graham Readfearn, “David Attenborough Netflix Documentary: Australian Scientists Break Down in Tears Over Climate Crisis,” The Guardian, June
3, 2021.
4. Peter Bradshaw, “2040 Review – An Optimist's Guide to Saving the World,”
The Guardian, November 7, 2019.
5. Naomi Zimmerman, “So, Is Organic Food Actually More Sustainable?” Columbia Climate School Student Blog, February 5, 2020.
6. Linda Semu, “Kamuzu's Mbumba: Malawi Women's Embeddedness to Culture in the Face of International Political Pressure and Internal Legal
Change,” Africa Today 49,
no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 77–99.
7. Ezequiel Burgo and Heather Stewart, “IMF Policies ‘Led to Malawi Famine’,”
The Guardian, October 28, 2002.

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 65


By Erik Wallenberg
Cooperatives
Against Capitalism
and White Supremacy:
Routes to Black Freedom
Black farmers today are fighting for
a share of the 2021 federal stimulus
package that was meant to redress
generations of discrimination
by banks and the government in
awarding subsidies, loans, and grants.
The $4 billion in debt forgiveness
is now being held up by white
farmers and other groups suing the
government to stop the distribution
of funds.1 This combination of
institutional and lawyerly white
supremacy has deep roots. Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr. addressed
this very issue in a 1968 speech
while building the Poor People’s
Campaign. Monica M. White reminds
us that King identified the racism of
white farmers who were themselves
“receiving millions of dollars in
federal subsidies not to farm” yet who
were also “the very people telling
the Black man that he ought to lift
himself up by his bootstraps.”
White has written a slim volume
that connects, across a long time
frame, social movements of Black
farmers to access land, knowledge,
and materials to create farms and
farming communities in the face of
white supremacy. The book, Freedom
66
Farmers: Agricultural Resistance
and the Black Freedom Movement,
jumps from the intellectuals and
academics Booker T. Washington,
George Washington Carver, and W. E.
B. Du Bois, to the 1960s cooperative
movement (with a particular focus
on Mississippi and Fannie Lou
Hamer), and finally to Detroit and
the urban farming movement of
the 2000s. Viewing cooperative
agriculture as a form of resistance
to white supremacy, these jumps
in time work to highlight moments
of organizing, even as they move
from South to North and from rural
to urban. This approach has its
drawbacks. Most notably, leaving out
Black farmer organizing in the 1930s,
particularly in the South, misses a
significant movement. Sharecropper
and tenant organizing, especially
in the Southern Tenant Farmers
Union, explicitly confronted white
supremacy along with the power of
capital, and undoubtedly shaped later
movements.2
Working as a sociologist, White
creates a sprawling theoretical
framework that presents each of
her historical cases as examples of
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
REVIEWS
“collective agency and community
resilience” which utilize a range
of practices including “economic
autonomy,” “prefigurative politics,”
and “commons as praxis.” In this way
the book is more sociological than
historical; and though she engages
some archives, much of the history is
drawn from secondary sources, field
work, and interviews with farmers in
Detroit and Mississippi.
The most exciting element of her
initial chapter is her engagement
with a recent biography of George
Washington Carver that highlights
his ecological outlook connecting
people, land, animals, and the
broader environment to a fulfilling
and healthy life.3 White casts the
well-worn debates between Du
Bois and Booker T. Washington in
a different light, focusing on the
practicality of farming. She shows
many examples of the “loving
care” that motivated Booker T.
Washington’s work, including the
creation of traveling agricultural
schools. There is some slipperiness
where White shows Black farmers
working to become owners of land
that they rent to tenants themselves,
recreating the exploitative
relationship that the cooperatives of
the 1960s attempted to work around.
This feels like a missed opportunity
to deal with the question of class,
and, in particular, how Du Bois’s
ideas changed over the subsequent
decades as he addressed capitalism
more systematically and turned
from mutual aid and cooperatives to
socialism and communism as key to
achieving collective freedom.4
“Our efforts to
promote cooperative
economics are
designed in essence
to get people to think
beyond the logic of
capitalism. But we
should be clear that
running a food
co-op or a cooperative
buying club isn’t the
same thing as having
state power where
you can redistribute
resources.”
White’s interest in the topic comes
from her encounter with the Detroit
Black Community Food Security
Network (DBCFSN) in 2006. She set
out to trace some of the roots of
this urban agriculture movement,
wanting to bring sociological and
historical perspectives to bear.
Though she says she is following
the descendants of those who
moved out of the South in the great
migrations of the twentieth century,
in particular in the aftermath of the
civil rights struggles of the 1960s,
she doesn’t explicitly show us those
connections in her interviews with
individuals. She does, however,
show us the work these urban Black
farmers are undertaking to try and
rebuild their shattered community
using food and farming in the
economically devastated Rust Belt.
By 2006, Detroit had only one major
grocery store chain in the 140 square
miles of the city, and by the following
year, none. While food deserts are
a common enough concept, this
fact is jarring in a city of seven
hundred thousand. The work of the
DBCFSN goes beyond bringing food
to this bleak reality. Malik Yakini,
a founder of the organization,
states one of their central aims is to
teach about the interconnectedness
of the environment, food, and
human health, in opposition
to epistemologies of dominion
over nature that exemplify the
Judeo-Christian approach to
relationships between humans
and the environment. The group’s
mission is to build an anti-racist and
anti-capitalist structure, to create
collective community wealth, and
to show what a different type of
farming and food system might
look like. As Yakini told White,
“Our efforts to promote cooperative
economics are designed in essence
to get people to think beyond the
logic of capitalism. But we should
be clear that running a food co-op
or a cooperative buying club isn’t
the same thing as having state
power where you can redistribute
resources.”
Of course, building cooperatives
within the confines of the
capitalist economic system is full
of contradictions; engagement
with another well-known anti-
capitalist cooperative in the South,
Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi,
might have illuminated ways of
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
addressing these complexities. While
White’s focus on the intentions of
these urban farmers helps give a
sense of their project, we have to
extrapolate the contradictions for
ourselves. For instance, what are we
to make of the fact that the DBCFSN
is sustained in part by grant money
from the Kellogg Foundation and by
volunteer labor?
DBCFSN is ultimately a much smaller
project–with only fifty members
beyond volunteers and tourists
who lend a hand–than the projects
White explores in the heart of the
book, which takes us to the late era
of the civil rights struggle starting
in 1967. Freedom Farmers is more
about the use of cooperatives than
resistance by farmers in general.
White argues that cooperatives
were a complement to the active
confrontation of boycotts, sit-ins,
marches, and protests. The work she
explores seems closer to the Black
Panther Party’s health, breakfast,
and education programs focused on
“survival pending revolution”5 than
active confrontation.
As an alternative to migrating
north in the face of plummeting
farm prices, as well as a response to
sharecropper and tenant evictions,
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee member and civil rights
activist Fannie Lou Hamer built the
over six-hundred-acre Freedom Farm
Cooperative in Sunflower County,
Mississippi. Hamer found innovative
solutions to rural poverty, creating
the Pig Bank (which bred pigs and
gave them away so rural farmers
could multiply their own pig farms)
and a housing development (which
built over eighty affordable homes
with electricity, running water, and
sewage). Her farm was one of the first
sites of a Head Start program in the
region and coordinated health and
dental care for hundreds of families.
Much of this was made possible by
federal money, a key difference with
67
the foundation grant money that
supports the much smaller Detroit
project. Freedom Farm closed by
1976 in the face of natural disasters,
personal crises, and, centrally,
the loss of government and other
funding; Ms. Hamer died of breast
cancer the following year.
White follows this chapter with two
more on cooperatives in Mississippi
and the broader region, the North
Bolivar County Farm Cooperative
and the still larger Federation of
Southern Cooperatives. The North
Bolivar coop was formed in response
to tenant farmers being evicted
from their land as owners were paid
subsidies by the government to leave
it fallow. A reprise of the problems in
the previous generation’s farm bills,
this example brings us closest to
moving beyond cooperatives and into
union organizing. White highlights
a 1965 strike by tractor drivers and a
subsequent occupation of the land,
including the establishment of a
strike city in Mississippi, but doesn’t
explore the option or debates around
unionizing farmers as a strategy.
Central to her argument is that these
projects show what is possible, and
it’s a strong point. Farmers were
politicized in the process of building
cooperative enterprises. Regardless
of how we propose getting past the
crises of capitalism, these projects all
show people’s interest, willingness,
and ability to organize a food
system for the health and safety of
their communities and the broader
physical and social ecology.
The regional Federation of Southern
Cooperatives provides the example
of how local white supremacists in
the banking and professional classes
organized to deny the cooperative
credit and loans, sabotaging their
work. In response to racist attacks
on newly integrated schools, the
Federation helped organize a school
boycott—a tactic more recently
68
highlighted as a northern innovation
of the movement—that lasted over a
week. We get tidbits of these great
examples of organizing through the
early 1970s, but we don’t hear how
they evolved or why the story stops
there.
The final chapter leaves rural
Mississippi in the mid-1970s and
jumps to urban Detroit. In 1974,
Detroit mayor Coleman Young
created the Farm-a-Lot program
to support urban agriculture as
the city hemorrhaged population.
Unfortunately, we don’t learn how
this program evolved over the
intervening thirty years, or how it
shaped any of the farmers that White
spends time with in the 2000s. These
jumps in time throughout the book
are jarring, leaving the reader with Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance
more questions than answers. White and the Black Freedom Movement
has compiled a lot of important Monica M. White (The University of
history related to the struggles and North Carolina Press, 2018) 208 pages
victories of Black farmers, important
players in the Black freedom struggle. Notes
The gaps that remain are a testament 1. Alan Rappeport, “Black Farmers Fear
to the fact that she has identified Foreclosure as Debt Relief Remains Frozen,”
The New York Times, February 21, 2022.
an important historical trend that
2. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
demands further investigation. Communists During the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
As LaDonna Redmond writes in Press, 1990).
her introduction, White has given 3. Mark D. Hersey, My Work Is That of
us a book to demolish the “culture Conservation: An Environmental Biography of
George Washington Carver (Athens: University
of poverty” arguments that blame of Georgia Press, 2011).
individuals for bad choices in relation 4. Bill Mullen, W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary
to food and health and instead shows Across the Color Line (London: Pluto Press, 2016).
systemic and root causes of these
issues. While White has illuminated
the crises that white supremacy
and capitalism cause in Black food
and agricultural politics, as well
as the dead end of liberal solutions
like food pantries and paternalism,
her argument often stops at the
importance of self-sufficiency.
Building on White’s crucial
foundation, more work is needed
to explore the ways Black farmers
and communities might win a food
system that meets basic human needs
for “survival pending revolution.”
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 REVIEWS By Mostafa Shagar and Nadine Fattaleh
On December 17, 2010, a vegetable
seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, walked
into the middle of traffic in Tunisia
and set himself on fire. This self-
immolation would later be cited as
the cause for the Tunisian protests
of 2011 leading to the ousting of
then-president Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali. The Tunisian “Jasmine Spring,”
as commentators were quick to
dub the uprisings, is arguably what
jostled the foundations of autocratic
regimes, and brought insurrection
across diverse terrains of struggle
in the Arab world. Behind the glitz
of mainstream media celebrating
urban-based demands for “bread,
freedom, and social justice,” few
sought to question who Bouazizi
was, and where he stood amidst
the class dynamic that tethered
the city to the countryside. Ten
years on, a small but growing field
of scholarship seeks a reappraisal
of the so-called Arab Spring,
situating it within a trajectory
of rural disenfranchisement and
dispossession, or what Max Ajl
memorably terms a long, “agrarian
winter.”1
Outstanding among these literature
was Habib Ayeb’s and Ray Bush’s
urgent book Food Insecurity and
Revolution in the Middle East
and North Africa—a descriptive
and exacting account of at least
a century of transformations of
Springtime for
Food Sovereignty
agriculture on the peripheries of
the global capitalist system. While it
describes food and farming through
a common thread of economic
reform, imperial warfare, and
compounding environmental stress
across the Middle East and North
Africa, it examines most closely
the cases of Tunisia and Egypt,
where the authors share long and
rich careers of scholarship and
activism.2 Rather than singling out
individual events and drawing out
deterministic inferences, Ayeb’s
and Bush’s analysis follows a simple
premise: it documents the “pressures
and constraints that farmers have
had to deal with,” examining the
“myriad and largely negative policy
interventions that have undermined,
and often displaced farmers and
communities with little provision
and opportunity for alternative non-
agricultural livelihoods” (p. 1)—in
other words, the interconnected
material conditions that engendered
the Arab Spring.
Working within the tradition of
political economy, Ayeb and Bush
offer an enlivened debate that builds
upon and extends the influential
work of Egyptian Marxist sociologist
Samir Amin, centering dynamics
of capital accumulation as they
configure the relationship between
the center and the periphery,
operating at the scales of the Global
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
North and the Global South, but
also within Tunisia and Egypt
between the metropolitan cities
and the agrarian countryside.3
The temporality of these parasitic
relationships spans decades: it
results from “a long accumulation
of privatizations, exclusions,
humiliations and dispossessions, and
also of resistance” (p. 55). In broad
strokes, the story goes as follows:
after independence, Egypt and
Tunisia sought to foster a modern,
productivist, export-oriented
agriculture sector where produce
was extracted from the periphery
(the South), and conveyed to the
center (the North) to be processed
and exported. The glimmering
exception to this trend was Nasserist
Egypt (1956–70), which promoted
an egalitarian redistribution of
land until it was quickly reversed
under the Sadat presidency (1970–
81). The disenfranchisement and
dispossession accelerated in the
1980s, when markets for land and
agricultural inputs were liberalized
and social safety nets available to
the masses were eroded in line
with the “recommendations”
(read: compulsion) of international
financial institutions like the IMF
and the World Bank. If this pattern
sounds familiar, it’s because it has
been the global norm under the
regime of neoliberalism. First signs
of protest against poor conditions of
69
existence began to emerge from the
rural classes during the bread riots
of 1984 (Tunisia) and 1977 (Egypt), in
many ways prefiguring a link to the
protests of the early 2010s.
To better understand these
socio-spatial processes of rural
immiseration, let’s consider the
emblematic case of Mohamed
Bouazizi’s suicide. While Western
analysts and Arab liberals preferred
to caricature him as an unemployed
urban youth, Ayeb’s fieldwork in
the central district of Sidi Bouzid,
Bouazizi’s hometown, would
suggest otherwise. Sidi Bouzid was
the site of intense rural unrest
in June–July 2010, in the months
directly preceding the Tunis-based
insurrection. Groups of farmers
organized sit-ins voicing a broad
range of demands, from access to
water, farmland, subsidies, and
agricultural inputs. Since the mid-
1990s, while capital flows into the
area nearly doubled the acreage of
available agricultural land, poverty
rates increased and groundwater
accessible to small farmers dried
up. In addition was the growing
problem of accumulated debt that
hit peasant families like Bouazizi’s
hard. Development experts tend to
inculpate small farmers’ laziness,
apathy, and mismanagement in
their inability to pay back mortgage
loans, drawing from familiar
colonial tropes. But Bouazizi’s family
lost their means of production
at the hands of systematic and
predatory lending practices, where
collusion between local banks and
foreign investors orchestrated land
grabs from the poorest and most
marginalized. No longer able to sow
and cultivate the soil passed down
through generations, Bouazizi’s
uncle affirms: “the reason [Mohamed]
did it is because the land was taken
away. It’s all linked. I want you to
understand the link” (p. 72).
Ayeb and Bush are adamant to draw
70
causal lines in the reverberations
of rural discontent across Egypt
and Tunisia beyond just the case of
Bouazizi and his family’s fate. They
display a penchant to map rural
disapproval and solidarity onto the
cartography of material formations
and class struggle, characterized as
nothing short of the “agrarian origins
of regime change.”
The enduring power
of the book is its
ability to chart
a different path
for emancipatory
possibilities
Alongside the political and ethical
imperative of recentering the
narrative of the voiceless peasants,
Ayeb and Bush also usefully disrupt
normative discourses on “food
security,” which have found renewed
interest in policy circles increasingly
drawn to statistical correlation
between food prices and political
volatility that algorithmically
predict food riots. As such, issues
of power and uneven access remain
veiled behind Foreign Direct
Investments, big capital, and export-
crop models, and international
organizations like the Food and
Agriculture Organization insist on
market-based solutions for ensuring
access to food. Farmers suffering
underdevelopment and poverty
are kept out of these transnational
entities making life-and-death
policy decisions based on what
economists dub the “comparative
advantage.” This alchemy of interests
consigns small-scale farmers to the
production of cash crops whose
export would support import of
basic food products, namely cereals,
while the terms of engagement are
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
all set in the North for the purpose
of siphoning and transferring
value from the South. The authors
insist that national discussions of
food security should be mirrored
in agricultural agendas free from
the hegemony of investors and
“modernizers.”
Conversations around agricultural
and farming in the Arab world
continue to be articulated through
the same tired lens of “food security,”
citing environmental stress, political
“instability,” and the Malthusian fear
of accelerated population growth
to support capitalist, trade-based
approaches to food provisioning
in the region. The enduring power
of the book is its ability to chart
a different path for emancipatory
possibilities, documenting and
expanding on alternatives emerging
from a grassroots level that cohere
around demands of access to land,
water, agricultural inputs, markets,
and government support. The
Arab world has historically been
underrepresented in both scholarship
and global social movements around
agriculture,4 but people’s demands
are starting to converge and more
clearly identify with the Food
Sovereignty movement which enjoys
wide popularity across the Global
South. First coined in 1996 by La Via
Campesina (LVC), a movement of
peasant farmers, “food sovereignty”
has become an alternative method
of agrarian change that focuses on
fair distribution of land and natural
resources, and self-determination of
food policy by the people.
The promotion of local agriculture
will neither happen overnight, nor
through the independent whim of
committed small producers. Signs
of change are emerging across
the region, with youths investing
in farming and experimenting
with novel technologies and social
formations. In the context of
Palestine, for example, young people
 Haitham Haddad

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 71

are forming cooperatives
(p. 12 in this volume), while the
Union of Agricultural Work
Committees, who is the regional
coordinator of LVC, persists in spite
of defamation campaigns by Zionist
settlers (p. 7). However, broader
structural conditions need to follow
these emerging trends in order
to support greater autonomy of
markets in the South and increased
independence from the strictures of
the global capitalist system and its
metabolic appropriation of profits
from peasant producers. National
sovereignty was once (and should
become) the guiding framework for
alternative models of development
which drew from Samir Amin’s
theories of dependency and delinking,
emphasizing the role of indigenous
labor and technology (p. 34).
Ayeb and Bush find optimism in
their reappraisal of the horizons
of possibility from the historical
pinnacle of the Non-Aligned
Movement, when newly independent
states across the South touted
progressive national development
policies supporting the redistribution
of land liberated from colonial
rule, and established the provision
of food as the cornerstone of their
social contract with citizens. These
nominal wins during the postwar
decolonization struggle were
reversed by the liberalization of the
1980s, the influx of global financial
institutions, and the neoliberal
policies that eviscerated the rural
hinterlands. The authors also seem
pessimistic about the possibilities
of today. Although the post-
revolutionary Egyptian constitution
of 2014, for example, included a
clause affirming food sovereignty
following farmer mobilizations, their
diagnosis is that it has had little
significant impact on the ground.
Despite greater visibility given to
rural issues, comprador capitalists
72
and their foreign beneficiaries have
doubled down on dispossession,
with frontier extraction, land grabs,
the transformation of agribusiness
continuing unabated, and at
accelerated rates.
The urgency of rethinking our
capitalist global food system from
the particularities of local contexts
in the Arab world will continue to
grow with the coming catastrophes.
The recent escalation of conflict
in Ukraine has been particularly
alarming given concerns over
shortages of international shipments
of wheat. Ukraine and Russia provide
about a quarter of the world’s
supply, satisfying, for example,
about 70 percent of Egypt’s wheat
imports. In breaking the chain of
import dependence and achieving
food sovereignty, the demands of Food Insecurity and Revolution in the
the people and social movements Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian
have and will continue to lead the Questions in Egypt and Tunisia
way. The Jordanian government, Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush
for example, has recently moved to (Anthem Press, 2019) 216 pages
reconsider the availability of land and
feasibility of irrigation infrastructure Notes
specifically for cereal cultivation 1. Max Ajl, “Does the Arab Region Have an
which had been on the backburner of Agrarian Question?” The Journal of Peasant
agricultural policy for at least three Studies 48, no. 5 (2021): 955–983.
decades.5 This has been the result 2. See ROAPE, "Justice, Equality, and
of years of on the ground activism, Struggle—An Interview with Ray
Bush," Review of African Political Economy
perhaps most visibly by a grassroots Blog, November 9, 2021; Max Ajl, "Food
organization called Al-Baraka Wheat. Sovereignty and the Environment: an
Since 2019, Al-Baraka (or “blessing”), interview with Habib Ayeb," Review of
African Political Economy Blog, April 12, 2018.
has encouraged the community
3. Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale:
to join educational efforts around
A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment
sowing and harvesting wheat on (New York: Monthly Review, 1974).
uncultivated land as well as raising 4. See Ajl, “Food Sovereignty and the
awareness about Jordan’s 97 percent Environment.”
crop import dependence. The success 5. Marta Vidal, “Russia-Ukraine war: Calls for
of this mobilization to induce lasting Middle East food sovereignty amid looming
wheat crisis,” Middle East Eye, March 18, 2022.
legislative changes on the ground
remains to be seen.6 Nevertheless, 6. Naziha Sa'eed, “Depleted Food Security" ...
Jordan Wakes up to the Reality of the Wheat
the core messages of both the book, Crisis [Arabic],” Raseef 22, April 11, 2022.
and the grassroots initiatives for food
sovereignty in the Arab world more
broadly, is to more loudly and visibly
articulate the urgency and hope
embedded in agrarian struggles.
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
 REVIEWS
The Indian economy has been
characterized by increasing
neoliberalization since the early
nineties. In 2020 and 2021, India’s
right-wing government attempted
to open up the agricultural sector
to private interests. In response,
farmers across India banded together
to bargain against the erasure of
their interests. What emerged was
a decisive victory for the coalition
of farmer and working-class
organizations: Bhartiya Kisan Union,
All India Kisan Sabha, All India Trade
Union Congress, among many others.
In light of recent successes, it is
important to understand the forces
and the experiences that have shaped
the lives of farmers in India, a topic
portrayed by intimate narratives
of farming families in Widows of
Vidarbha.
Written by journalist Kota Neelima,
the book was published at a time
when the disenfranchisement and
economic hardship experienced by
farmers was resulting in public acts
of civil disobedience, such as that in
Maharashtra, where farmers joined
long marches to the state capital
of Mumbai.1 Their protests and
occupations caught international
headlines and brought to light some
particularly disturbing statistics.
National records indicate that, on
average, one farmer committed
suicide in India every half hour
By Vassiki Chauhan
Stories of Struggle
and Strife
between 1997 and 2005, and this
number has only increased in recent
years.2 The situation was particularly
severe in the region of Vidarbha,
in the state of Maharashtra—whose
farmers’ stories are captured by
Neelima’s heartfelt volume.
Neelima’s commitment to the
longitudinal examination of the life
and strife of farmers’ families in
light of mass suicides is notable. She
supplements the firsthand interviews
with facts and figures from a vast
variety of sources, but without losing
her humanistic narration, to bring to
light the trauma that these families
undergo after the death of their
patriarch. Particularly, her follow-
ups in 2017 with families she first
connected with in 2014–2015 starkly
highlight the inadequacy of social
support for the suffering widows and
families.
The stories are made richer by the
variegated age, education level,
family size, caste, and religion of the
widows in the story.3 What’s more
compelling is the commonalities
across diverse narratives that
emerge, that is, the shared material
conditions: difficulty of accessing
state-provided aid in the immediate
aftermath of a suicide; the amount
and nature of financial aid meted
out; the persistence of debt in spite
of aid; the types of crops the farmers
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
had been growing; and the ensuing
disenfranchisement experienced by
the families. The book doesn’t tell us
whether farmers availed themselves
or were even aware of government
programs and subsidies to support
rural populations and agricultural
workers—for example, the provisions
under the controversial Mahatma
Gandhi National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act. We also don’t know
whether farmers were selling their
crops to middlemen or in markets
that enforce minimum support
prices. Nevertheless, in struggling
to make ends meet with reduced
income below the poverty line, in
tussling with the government to
obtain ration cards for purchasing
basic necessities, the families’
stirring experiences come through
loud and clear.
Every interviewee reported
difficulties in accessing information
about the debt they inherited in
the aftermath of the suicides,
as well as in obtaining clear
guidelines for the evidence they
needed to establish grounds for
receiving financial assistance. They
encountered deep insensitivity in the
questionnaire tailored to determine
the productivity of their farmland
and investigating whether irrelevant
causes, such as substance use, were
to blame. Providing bureaucratic
information within a strict time
73
frame was also burdensome.
Throughout the farmers’ stories, a
familiar refrain was that those who
depend on state support and welfare
were viewed with suspicion, if not
as outright criminals.
The stories elucidate
a problem that isn't
farmers.4 And it is exactly such a
big picture that is missing from the
book.
While the book explicates the burden
on the widows, the omission of the
gendered nature of agricultural land
ownership is glaring. Even as the
widows are compelled into becoming
day laborers, Neelima’s follow-up
interviews fail to broaden the scope
their agency to pursue collective
actions and fight.
The widows of Vidarbha are active
participants at the ground zero of
the farmers’ protest: Delhi.7 Some
of the widows, like Bharati Pawar,
marched all the way to the capital.
While people in positions of power
were costing the protestors their
lives under the wheels, scores of

unique to Vidarbha of the investigation to account for

or India, but one
that has emerged
all over the world.
The widows also recognized how
“condemned” farming has become.
This is apparent in their concern for
their children’s future, whether that
future be sons taking up the same
profession or daughters marrying
those who await the same fate as
their fathers. For many farmers,
land was the sole inheritance
and source of sustenance. The
reluctance to sell ancestral land
and take up daily wage labor is
another consistent thread, as is
the inevitability of earning wages
through hourly and daily work for
the widows that are left behind.
Their primary goal was to offer
their children a path out of the
cycle of dependence on farming
through education.
These interviews as a whole
elucidate a problem that isn’t
unique to Vidarbha or India, but
one that has emerged all over
the world. Small-scale farmers
are dispossessed by industrial
capital of the agricultural sector.
It is unsurprising, then, that
the mobilization of peasants
and farmers against neoliberal
privatization in agriculture drew
global support from family-owned
and small-scale cultivators and
migrant farm workers that work
women farmworkers participated in
a tractor rally demanding to repeal
alongside the widows—especially
considering the growth in the
agrarian privatization legislations.8
The prolonged demonstrations
number of landless peasants between ended in victory for the farmers.9
2001 and 2011 in India.5 Moreover, These women have found solidarity
by focusing primarily on financial with each other in their suffering;
assistance after the suicides, other they have reemerged en force and
important conditions of life that the won against the soul-crushing
widows desperately need are ignored: machinations of a state that
vocational training, community champions capitalism as progress.
support, and mental health services,
to name a few.6 Perhaps the future of widowed
peasants in particular, and of the
Similarly, while the book emphasizes people in general, is not as dystopian
the obligations that the widows as Neelima poses.
are left with, including becoming
primary caretakers and providers for
their children and extended families,
it underplays the widows’ aspirations
for a better life—providing assistance
for other women in similar
situations, collectively struggling for
peasants and farmers, and attaining
financial independence or personal
growth through change of work,
education, and/or remarriage.
Overall, the book paints a dismal
picture of the meager resources for
small-scale farmers who rely heavily
on growing cash crops to feed their
families, whose attempts to sustain
their lives and those of their families
are mercilessly thwarted by cycles of
debt and lack of social support. While
this is not to deny that Neelima’s
narrative device has sufficiently Widows of Vidarbha: Making of Shadows
created the space for grieving the Kota Neelima (Oxford University
lives lost to economic crises, another Press, India, 2018) 284 pages
unrecognized aspect in the story
from Vidarbha is equally, if not more,
urgent in our current conjuncture:

74
 Roti
Ingredients Staple in many Indian households, Rotis were passed out in large quantities in langar
2 cups flour style meals in recent farmers' strug g les. They were shared among protestors as well

1 cup water as onlookers. Featuring in a colloquial recog nition of the trifecta of material needs,
roti-kapda-makan (food, clothing , and shelter), this roti recipe is a reminder that
1-2 Tbsp oil (optional)
food for the masses often relies on a humble list of ingredients.

Method
Knead the flour, water, and oil into doug h

Shape half handfuls of doug h into a small round saucer and then flatten them to look like thick pancakes

Roll them out into tortilla-like shape, called roti, with a rolling pin

Place the roti on a griddle or heavy flat frying pan heated on medium hig h

Parts of the roti may puff up

Flip the roti over in about 25 seconds (parts of roti may be toasted)

Make sure the roti is fully cooked before removing it from the stove

You can butter one or both sides of the roti once it is off the stove.

Enjoy with a sabzi or dal or both

Serves 4–6 people (makes 12 rotis)

Notes
1. Web Desk, “Farmers to March from Thane to Mumbai Pressing for Demands,” The Week, November 21, 2018.
2. P. Sainath, “One Farmer’s Suicide Every 30 Minutes,” India Together, November 14, 2007, “Every Day, 28 People Dependent on Farming Die by
Suicide in India,” DownToEarth, September 3, 2020.
3. However, details about the latter two demographic identifiers are absent from the appendices. Under a long-standing, concerted effort to
homogenize national identity along fundamentalist, religious lines, the relationship between demographic differences and access to public
resources is particularly important.
4. “India Farmers’ Protest: Peasants around the World Send Messages of Solidarity and Support,” La Via Campesina, January 6, 2021.
5. Bharat Dogra, “Amid An Important Farmer Debate, Don’t Forget the Woes of India's Landless Workers,” The Wire, November 30, 2020.
6. A recent report by the Brookings Institute calls for a closer examination of the mental health history of rural, landowning farmers. However, it
places the burden of intervention on public health measures and guidelines for journalism, rather than on agricultural reform, debt forgiveness,
and further research on the erasure of gendered implications of the agriculture sector’s neoliberalization. See Shamika Ravi, “A Reality Check on
Suicides in India,” Brookings India Impact Series: Development and Governance (2005).
7. Express News Service, “Widows of Vidarbha Farmers Join Stir at Delhi Borders,” The Indian Express, January 24, 2021.
8. Nilanjana Bhowmick, “‘I Cannot Be Intimidated. I Cannot Be Bought.’ The Women Leading India’s Farmers’ Protests,” Time, March 4, 2021.
9. Lauren Frayer, “India’s Farmers Faced down a Popular Prime Minister and Won. What Will They Do Now?,” NPR, November 26, 2021.

75
 REVIEWS
In one of her final essays, the
acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K.
Le Guin concluded that almost all
utopias described in contemporary
fiction imagine a world under total
control, with little room left for any
uncertainty and unknowability. She
used the metaphor of yin and yang,
where yin portrays uncertainty and
yang domination, and speculated
whether there was a way to balance
each in a utopia. She didn’t have a
clear answer but was convinced that
thinking along such a line would
allow the dreams of endless growth
and domination to be replaced by
those of adaptability and long-term
survival, which involve “a patience
with uncertainty and the makeshift,
a friendship with water, earth and
darkness.”1
It is rather fitting that Half-Earth
Socialism, a revival of the utopian
socialist tradition by Troy Vettese and
Drew Pendergrass, then ends with an
aphorism from Le Guin which asks
for humility from humans in “dark
places.” Humanity is indeed in a dark
place with the Sixth Extinction afoot,
and increasingly severe disasters
with little in the way of relief, either
in the form of reducing emissions or
preventing biodiversity loss.
Le Guin remains relevant throughout
the book, from the authors’ imagined
utopia that evokes images of Anarres
to the underlying philosophies
of the authors. Rejecting both
76
How to
Build a Utopia
ecomodernism and Malthusianism,
both of which assume a total control
of nature by humans for their selfish
ends, the authors instead advocate
for a symbiosis with nature, inspired
by Edward Jenner’s contributions
to environmental thought. Jenner
had posited in 1798 that zoonotic
diseases arise when interspecies
boundaries are violated (i.e., wild
areas being repurposed for human
use such as agriculture). Extending
that thesis, the authors contend
that nature remains unknowable
(and ungovernable), and therefore
attempts to intervene, through
either artificial geoengineering
like solar radiation management or
neoliberal market mechanisms (e.g.
cap-and-trade programs, carbon tax),
are doomed to fail. This philosophy
serves as the guide for the authors’
fascinating, but critical, thought
experiment: What if we could use
all the resources available to us to
rebuild the world to coexist with
nature?
The answer takes the form of “Half-
Earth socialism,” a moniker drawn
from E.O. Wilson’s controversial
Half-Earth proposal, where to save
85 percent of the extant species,
we must conserve 50 percent of the
land mass. Wilson’s work on island
biogeography, which showed that
biodiversity depended on the size
of the area, led to his realization
that nature preserves act as islands.
This further informed his callous
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
By Nafis Hasan
proposal, which if implemented
under capitalism would entrench
the displacement of Indigenous
people from their lands. Cognizant
of such consequences, Vettese and
Pendergrass point out that for this
proposal to become a reality, it
must be socialist in practice. To
describe such a socialist system,
the authors attempt to answer the
“hard questions about politics in
an age of ecological collapse: What
is socialism? How does socialist
democracy work? How could an eco-
socialist coalition take power? How
would local, national, and global
levels of government interact?”
(p. 12). Drawing from ecology to
cybernetics to history, Vettese and
Pendergrass propose a “vision of the
future that can develop into a total
alternative to capitalism” (p. 21).
Utopia: Socialist and Scientific
At the center of Half-Earth
Socialism’s thought experiment is the
idea of central planning, i.e., how to
best distribute our resources to meet
everyone’s needs without involving
the market or money. Vettese and
Pendergrass draw their inspiration
from the Viennese polymath of the
early 20th century, Otto Neurath,
and use his concept of in natura
calculation (calculation in kind)
to develop “total plans” for their
utopia. While easily confused with a
barter system, in natura calculation
is defined by the authors as an
information system that exposes the
relation between different goods.
Neurath’s idea of “total plan” is the
mobilization of an entire society’s
productive capacity—not just labor
hours, but other production limits as
well, such as natural resources. Such
a “total plan,” Neurath imagined,
would make money’s function as
a universal equivalent irrelevant,
thus creating an economy without
money. Neurath didn’t leave behind
details of how such an information
system would work in practice, so
the authors turned to the Soviet
mathematician Leonid Kantorovich.
Kantorovich’s “linear programming”
algorithm, developed in 1939,
provided a way to “balance
competing restrictions in their
natural units—tonnes of steel and
concrete or hours of labour” (p.
91). Case in point, during the 1941
siege of Leningrad, Kantorovich was
able to use this program to bring
thousands of tonnes of supplies
(fuel, food, munitions) into the city
and transport out approximately
one and a half million citizens
over the icy Lake Ladoga via trucks
in unpredictable winter weather
conditions. The algorithm was able to
determine, within given constraints,
how to best allocate resources for a
desired outcome. Kantorovich also
used it to optimize factory operations
and railroad car production. Such
applications showed that resource
allocation was possible without
the use of money or the invisible
hand of the market to balance
production and distribution. Despite
Kantorovich’s success, however,
political reality stood in the way of
its full economy-wide application;
an ideal centrally planned economy
would disempower the Soviet elites,
and thus Kantorovich’s algorithm
proved to be a thorn in their side.
How would the marriage of
Kantorovich’s and Neurath’s ideas
work? Vettese and Pendergrass offer
a utopian example where a central
planning body, Gosplant, creates a
number of “total plans” for society
based on two major restrictions: (1)
how much of nature can be utilized
while keeping the biosphere healthy,
and (2) how to meet everyone’s
needs.2 Current scientific literature
on planetary boundaries provides the
input on natural resources—e.g., 50
percent of land mass, 62 megatonnes
nitrogen, and 6.2 megatonnes
phosphate per year that can be used
without causing mass eutrophication;
4 petraliters of freshwater for
consumption per year; etc. Using
these parameters, the Gosplant
planners can propose a number
of scenarios which have different
outcomes (e.g., 30 percent of land
mass conserved, or exceeding the
carbon budget), each of which, when
run through the linear programming
algorithm, need to strike a balance
between the several different
parameters mentioned prior.
These are wishful
thinking scenarios,
but they are meant
to provide the
“blueprints” of a
society that can
survive and thrive
within the finite
limits of our planet.
Take the case of diet and see the
Gosplant plan in action. If the goal
is for everyone to eat a healthy diet,
then a population (assumed to be ten
billion) of majority omnivores would
require, under current production
regimens, 1.08 hectares of land per
capita and 2.05 tonnes of carbon
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER
per year. For a world population of
majority vegetarians, the cost comes
down to 0.14 hectares per person
and 1.39 tonnes of carbon per year;
and with widespread veganism, land
use goes down to 0.13 hectares per
person and 1.05 tonnes of carbon
per year. A similar plan for energy
usage assumes energy quotas for
individuals, and strikes a balance
between available sources of energy—
including fossil fuels, but excluding
nuclear power.
Such plans are meant to evolve along
with technological developments
or social needs. For example, if
veganism is not enough to free up
land required to save 85 percent of
the human species, then the plan
could be adjusted to further reduce
the energy quota afforded to each
person. On the flip side, there could
be another plan which doesn’t cut
down energy quotas, but rather
opts for reducing the number of
species that can be saved. A future
technological breakthrough—green
hydrogen, for instance—could allow
planners to meet their ambitious
targets (keeping global warming
under 1.5° C, total electrification of
the energy system, preserving 85
percent of species) and accommodate
a population of up to 24 percent
omnivores. These are wishful
thinking scenarios, but they are
meant to provide the “blueprints”
of a society that can survive and
thrive within the finite limits of our
planet. While carrying capacity is
often viewed as a de facto Malthusian
concept, it is to the authors' credit
that they attempt to propose an all-
encompassing socialist alternative
that grapples with planetary
boundaries that does not rely on
ecofascist tropes.
A simple version of the Gosplant
would inevitably conjure images of a
totalitarian society. The purpose of
Gosplant, however, is not to choose
which plan should be executed—
77
that is to be decided democratically
by a "global parliament” where
representatives must decide on
trade-offs. To that end, the authors
suggest that linear programming
be incorporated into public
education along with pictographic
representation of trade-offs (inspired
by Neurath), with the hopes that an
education tied to material interests
may de-alienate the worker from
their labor and help them see
themselves as part of a larger whole.
To further remove any suspicions
that Gosplant could become Big
Brother, the authors propose a
multi-layered planning process,
where Gosplant would interact with
regional governments and workplace
managers. Such a “single complex
of interconnected models” would
operate with autonomy to some
degree, and adjust plans according
to the feedback to deal with
contingencies (p. 119). The flexibility
built into the idea of Gosplant also
allows it to be applied at different
scales—one country, a larger region,
or ideally, the whole world—but
its function is primarily to process
information, rather than to govern.
The authors point to the Cybersyn
experiment in Chile, a central
planning body developed by
cybernetician Stafford Beer for the
Salvador Allende government, as a
proof-of-concept on how this complex
of models might work. When the
CIA disrupted communications
during the 1973 coup, the Allende
government was able to mobilize
thousands of workers using this
system. Unfortunately, it was
ultimately unable to save the Chilean
economy against the embargoes put
on by the United States. Outside of
actually existing socialist states, one
would recognize central planning in
practice even in the United States,
where price controls have historically
been used to control the economy.3
78
Technocratic solutions or
blueprints are not uncommon; the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) creates various similar
models with predicted outcomes and
presents them to the UN and national
governments. While Gosplant is in
part inspired by historical and current
climate models, it provides plans for
The utopia also
portrays Indigenous
folks leading efforts
in conservation and
governance of their
own territories. How
these Indigenous
territories are re-
established, however,
remains vague, as
does their purpose.
resource allocation and distribution
to prevent (or enact) the scenarios
that the IPCC reports predict. The
fundamental difference remains
that Gosplant exists in a world where
a socialist revolution has already
taken place: rather than asking what
is to be done, the authors are asking
what to do after. This approach can
be seen as avoiding the extremely
difficult question of organizing a
fragmented working class in an
uneven world where imperialism is
codified into global supply chains that
treat the global South as sacrificial
zones. But it also remains true that
leftists lack concrete visions of how
a socialist society should function,
thus necessitating discussions of such
futures.
VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
Red Vegans and Green Peasants
The authors’ rejection of artificial
geoengineering stems from their
embrace of nature as unknowable;
they reject nuclear power as a
viable option by discounting its
advertised benefits. The goals of Half-
Earth Socialism then rely on a fully
renewable energy system and natural
geoengineering, i.e., rewilding,
to capture carbon in ecosystems.4
This counterproposal runs into the
contentious issue of land scarcity; the
authors cite Vaclav Smil’s estimates
that a fully renewable energy system
will take up to 25–50 percent of
landmass in the United States, and
almost 100 percent in the United
Kingdom. When one adds that 50
percent of landmass needs to be
rewilded, it becomes a question
of how to thread this extremely
fine needle. The authors propose
widespread veganism and energy
quotas as feasible solutions to this
issue.
Any sort of austerity measure has
been a source of contention with
ecomodernists, whereas veganism
as a solution has been attacked by
agroecology and peasant movement
advocates. In a scathing critique,
Max Ajl and Rob Wallace attacked
Vettese’s rewilding proposal “for
which half of the planet would be
scraped clean of humanity” and his
veganism for advocating for “brute
confiscation and erasure” of peasants
and pastoralists.5 The colonial roots
of rewilding and conservation adds
to the critique, as does the concept
of “natural capital,” a way to valorize
nature which currently stands at $44
trillion.6
To be clear, Vettese and Pendergrass
are well aware of the troubling roots
of the half-earth movement and the
colonial past of conservation. In fact,
they advocate for such rewilding to
be managed by Indigenous peoples,
although there is little mention
of the Land Back movement or
reparations/repatriation of stolen
land. The utopia depicted at the
end of the book does incorporate
Indigenous practices such as the
Anishinaabe Three Sisters farming
(bean, maize, and winter squash) and
educational materials from the Axe
Handle Academy (part of the Alaska
Native Knowledge Network). The
utopia also portrays Indigenous folks
leading efforts in conservation and
governance of their own territories.
How these Indigenous territories are
re-established, however, remains
vague, as does their purpose.
For example, do these territories
also include land earmarked for
rewilding?
Veganism, often a touchy subject
for the left, features prominently in
the authors’ plans. The authors are
well aware that under capitalism,
veganism can take the form of
privilege and a consumerist solution
to the climate crisis. But to them,
widespread veganism is the logical
outcome of the resource allocation
calculations under a socialist regime,
considering that livestock comprises
60 percent of total terrestrial
biomass, compared to 4 percent
wild mammals (the remainder is
humans), and takes up four billion
hectares (40 percent of habitable
land); and 36 percent of calories
from the world’s crops are used for
animal feed (p. 77).7 To counter the
critique of vegan privilege, they
point out that in the US, vegans are
disproportionately working-class
people of color (wealth is an indicator
for meat consumption) and that
an average North American eats
almost ten times more meat than the
average African (p. 105).8 Thus, any
restrictions on meat consumption
is meant to be disproportionate,
with the effect on Western societies
preceding those in the global South,
whose societies have alternative
traditions of farming, sustenance,
and relationships with animals. This particular book doesn’t have
It is also worth noting that the an answer to that. However, what
global South suffers directly from it does provide is a “starting point
this unequal meat consumption. for a deeper discussion of how
Brazil, for example, is one of the socialism should function in an age
largest meat exporters and is facing of ecological collapse,” a blindspot
increased deforestation at the cost of for those of us who refuse to accept
both biodiversity loss and Indigenous capitalism’s power as inescapable.
sustenance practices.9
Elsewhere, the authors echo the
demand of Degrowth advocates
that the global North’s energy use
be curbed prior to putting any
restrictions on the global South. In
fact, Ajl speaks approvingly of energy
rations, and supports the idea that
democratic participation is necessary
to determine use of resources;
there is no doubt that both camps
support the cruel practice of factory
farming.10
More importantly, it seems that red
vegans and green peasants can co-
exist within this half-earth utopia.
Both sides use Cuba’s Periodo Especial
as proof-of-concept of their ideas—a
time when Cuba had to decarbonize
overnight after being cut off from Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the
Soviet oil in the 1990s (p. 83).11 Future from Extinction, Climate Change
Havana ultimately flourished with and Pandemics
twenty-six thousand urban gardens, Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese
while almost 30 percent of the land (Verso, 2022) 240 pages
was rewilded. Cubans consumed
less meat, and biking and walking Notes
replaced cars and buses. Despite such 1. Electric Literature, “Ursula K. Le Guin
“austerity,” universal healthcare and Explains How to Build a New Kind of
Utopia,” Electric Literature, December 5, 2017.
education were still provided, the
2. Gosplant is a play on Gosplan, the Soviet
shining example of which remains state planning committee.
Cuba’s vaccine against COVID-19.12
3. Andrew Yamakawa Elrod, “Controlled
Prices,” Phenomenal World, January 12, 2022.
Besides cursory mention of the need 4. Pendergrass and Vettese cite climate
for a coalition of socialists to be scientist Ulrich Kreidenweiss who showed
led by an anti-nuclear movement, that reforesting 2.6 billion hectares could
entomb 860 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2100
Half-Earth Socialism is sorely missing (p. 81).
a concrete organizing strategy, a
5. Max Ajl and Rob Wallace, “Red Vegans
necessity in today’s world. How do against Green Peasants,” New Socialist,
we build the power to implement a October 16, 2021.
utopian plan, or for that matter any 6. Alex Heffron and Kai Heron, “Renewing the
plan, when even milquetoast social Land Question: Against Greengrabbing and
Green Colonialism,” New Socialist, February
democratic proposals are being 20, 2022.
vigorously opposed as emissions rise
and IPCC warnings keep ringing?
notes continue on page 80
THE SOIL AND THE WORKER 79
 notes continued from
“Earthy Knowledge: Rethinking Chinese Terracing Campaigns”
6. For examples in English, see Tubten Khétsun, Memories of Life in Lhasa
Under Chinese Rule (Columbia UP, 2008), 270; Wang Qinghua, “Forest
Management and Terraced Agriculture: Case Study of Hani of Ailao
Mountains, Yunnan,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 30 (2001),
2846–2850.
7. Zhou Feng, “Zhaozi, gunzi, dunzi” [Whistle, rod, and bin], Renmin
ribao, November 6, 1980, 8.
8. Zhang Zhaoguo and Wei Chunying, “Jiyu nongye xue Dazhai
yundong wei ge’an de ‘yidaoqie’ xianxiang lunxi” [A case-by-case
analysis of the “cutting-with-one-knife” phenomenon in the Study
Dazhai in Agriculture movement], Shanxi gaodeng xuexiao shehui kexue
xuebao 23, no. 6 (2011): 15–18.
9. Sigrid Schmalzer, “Layer upon Layer: Mao-Era History and the
Construction of China’s Agricultural Heritage,” EASTS 13 (2019): 1–9.
10. “Anzhao shiji qingkuang jueding gongzuo fangzhen: Guangdong
Qiongshan xianwei lingdao qunzhong xue Dazhai de tihui”
[Determine work plans according to practical situations:
Experiences of Qiongshan County, Guangdong CPC leading the
masses in studying Dazhai], Renmin ribao, October 14, 1972, 4.
11. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished
Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), 218.
12. Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in
Socialist China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
13. Sha Yin and Fan Yinhuai, “Dazhai zhi lu,” Renmin ribao, February 10,
1964, 1–2.
14. Shexian Wangjinzhuang gongshe dangweihui, “Xionghuai chaoyang
xue Dazhai, zhantian doudi hui xin tu” [One’s heart filled with the
rising sun, study Dazhai, and struggle against heaven and earth to
create a new world], She County archives, January 1, 1968, 64.
15. Dazhai dadui keyan xiaozu, “Dazhai tian de jianshe ji qi feili
tezheng” [The construction of Dazhai fields and their fertility
characteristics], Zhongguo kexue 6 (1975): 593–601.
16. “Li zhuangzhi zhansheng kunnan, shu xiongxin jianshe shanqu”
[Setting a goal to overcome difficulties, cultivating an ambition to
develop the mountain regions], She County archives, February 25,
1965, 107–109.
17. Schmalzer, “Layer upon Layer.”
18. Slash-and-burn techniques have recently been reevaluated by
environmentalists. See Michael Hathaway, Environmental Winds:
Making the Global in Southwest China (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013).
19. Schmalzer, “Layer upon Layer.”
notes continued from “Fear of A Black Planet: Archival Notes ”
9. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered:
An Address Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at
Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann & Co.: 1854).
10. “Aswell Fights Anti-Lynching Bill in U.S. Congress,” Vernon Parish
Democrat, December 22, 1919.
11. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
80 VOLUME 25 | NO. 1
notes continued from “Heading for the Last Roundup”
7. Carey Gillam, Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the
Corruption of Science (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2017), 1–2.
8. “Monsanto brought in more than $2 billion per year from its
herbicides . . . and more than $10 billion more per year from its seed
business.” Carey Gillam, The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate
Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice (Washington, DC: Island
Press, 2021), 214.
9. Gillam, Whitewash, 3.
10. Gillam, Whitewash, 15, 155, 157.
11. Quoted in Gillam, Monsanto Papers, 127; Gillam, Whitewash, 86, 89.
12. Gillam, Monsanto Papers, 53.
13. Quoted in Gillam, Whitewash, 97.
14. Carey Gillam, “I'm a Journalist: Monsanto Built a Step-By-Step
Strategy to Destroy My Reputation,” The Guardian, Aug 9, 2019;
Sam Levin, “Revealed: How Monsanto’s ‘Intelligence Center’
Targeted Journalists and Activists.” The Guardian, August 8, 2019.
15. Conner, Tragedy of American Science, 29–30.
16. Robert N. Proctor, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the
Cultural Production of Ignorance (And Its Study),” in Agnotology:
The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa
Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1–36.
17. The acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer brought its own controversy.
A 1999 lawsuit launched by a Holocaust survivor accused Bayer
of being involved with Josef Mengele's experiments on Jewish
children. Bayer's predecessor, the conglomerate IG Farben, was the
manufactuer of the gas chamber poison Zyklon B used during the
Holocaust. See Edmund L. Andrews, “I.G. Farben: A Lingering Relic of
the Nazi Years,” The New York Times, May 2, 1999.
18. Carey Gillam, personal communication, March 22, 2022.
19. Jessica Fu, “Bayer Will Stop Selling Roundup for Residential Use in
2023, an Effort To Prevent Future Cancer Lawsuits,” The Counter, July
30, 2021.
20. The precautionary principle is an ethical and legal norm that guides
the European Union’s GMO regulatory policies. Its essence is that
waiting for scientific certainty of negative consequences before
taking action to protect human health and the environment is
unconscionable. The precautionary principle has been adopted into
international laws like the UN World Charter for Nature (1982), The
declaration of the International Conference on the Protection of
the North Sea (1987), and the Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development (1992).
21. Richard Lewontin, “Genes in the Food!” in It Ain’t Necessarily So:
The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York: NYRB
Press), 362.
notes continued from “How to Build A Utopia ”
7. Emily S. Cassidy et al., “Redefining Agricultural Yields: from Tonnes
to People Nourished per Hectare,” Environmental Research Letters
8, no. 3 (August 2013): 034015.
8. Jamie Berger, “How Black North Carolinians Pay the Price for the
World’s Cheap Bacon,” Vox, April 1, 2022.
9. Dom Phillips et al., “Revealed: Rampant Deforestation of Amazon
Driven by Global Greed for Meat,” The Guardian, July 2, 2019.
10. Max Ajl, “Beyond the Green New Deal,” Brooklyn Rail,
July–August, 2020.
11. Aidan Ratchford, “Agroecology and the Survival of Cuban
Socialism,” New Socialist, October 16, 2021.
12. Sam Meredith, “Why Cuba’s Extraordinary Covid Vaccine Success
Could Provide the Best Hope for Low-income Countries,” CNBC,
January 13, 2022.
Artwork by Rosanna Morris, from viacampesina.org and rosannamorris.com with permission.

THE SOIL AND THE WORKER

 “Land of Despair (‫)أرض اليأس‬, as a name,
is derived from Nietzche’s understanding
of despair as the price paid to acquire self-
awareness. In this world, it seems the more
we know, the more despair we feel, but at
the same time, we use this despair to fuel
a productive path towards the future.”

Adham Karajeh (Ard Al-Ya’as Cooperative, Saffa, Palestine)