Ghost Kitchens Are Disappearing, Squeezed by Demand and Complaints - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/business/ghost-kitchens-restaurants-pandemic.html
Delivery-only operations boomed during the pandemic. Now Wendy’s, Kroger and mom-and-pop food businesses are rethinking their operations.
État limite - Regarder le documentaire complet | ARTE
▻https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/111769-000-A/etat-limite
Dans les pas de plus en plus las de ce jeune praticien à l’intelligence et à l’humanité en alerte, la caméra de Nicolas Peduzzi (Ghost Song, Southern Belle) pénètre avec pudeur dans les chambres de l’hôpital, refuges de destins accidentés, pour observer l’émouvante construction d’une relation thérapeutique fondée sur le lien, entre tête-à-tête et atelier de théâtre. Mais comment soigner dans une institution malade ? Émaillé de photographies en noir et blanc de Pénélope Chauvelot, sublimes parenthèses d’immobilité au cœur de l’urgence, ce documentaire mélancolique et politique sonde le déclassement de la médecine psychiatrique et l’effondrement de l’hôpital public, miroir d’une société qui relègue les plus fragiles à la marge et pousse ceux qui prennent soin d’eux au-delà de leurs limites.
Visualizing Music Through Data: Are The Most Popular Ghost Songs Statistically More Metal?
▻https://nightingaledvs.com/visualizing-music-through-data
Ghost, the Swedish satanic metal band that blew up during the summer of 2022 when their song “Mary On A Cross” went viral on TikTok, now has over 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify—rising from around 2 million before summer of 2021.
[Chroniques Mutantes] Chroniques Mutantes #385
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/chroniques-mutantes-/chroniques-mutantes-385
Revue de presse
Chronique sur le livre Ida ou le délire d’Hélène Bessette
Chronique sur la série Young Royals
Chroniques sur le livre Ghost Town de Kevin Shen
Playlist : Kim Gordon / I’m a man, Pelada / La gente se levanta, Thpu / Even in his youth, Ultramoderne / Si je suis bien que si j’ai bu, Tune Zitoune / Bahdja Baida
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/chroniques-mutantes-/chroniques-mutantes-385_17507__1.mp3
The Anti-Palestinian Origins of The War on Terror
▻https://foreverwars.ghost.io/the-anti-palestinian-origins-of-the-war-on-terror
The very origins of U.S. counterterrorism laws, the foundation stones upon which the War on Terror was built, had Palestinians in mind, not militant groups targeting the United States. Many of those laws came into being with the aid of Zionist organizations in the United States, guiding lawmakers toward conceptions of counterterrorism that targeted Palestinian finances, associations and freedoms.
The report is called “Anti-Palestinian at the Core: The Origins and Growing Dangers of U.S. Anti-Terrorism Law,” written by Darryl Li and published jointly last week by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Backlight: Ghost in the network
▻https://www.lighthousereports.com/backlight-ghost-in-the-network
Find out more about what it takes to do award winning journalism from our lead investigators and collaborators.
Celebrating World VFX Day - Chris Lumb
▻https://www.mydylarama.org.uk/Celebrating-World-VFX-Day-Chris-Lumb
In our final instalment for World VFX day we spoke to comedian and old school effects fan Chris Lumb about the library ghost from Ghostbusters and the face melting scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ghostbusters - library ghost (Ivan Reitman, 1984) EEG When I about 7yrs old I saw Ghostbusters at the cinema with my brother and was totally blown away by this jump scare at the start. screaming at me. It’s terrifying! I love the way she shushes them first and then instantly changes, she (...) #Screen_Extra
“I Love You “, Asaf Avidan, ICHNOLOGY Solo Tour 31 Octobre 2023
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TOStOWZsI
Your Anchor, Asaf Avidan, Barcelona 6th October 2023
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewn-VGfwtlw
▻https://asafavidanmusic.bandcamp.com/album/avidan-in-a-box-live-acoustic-recordings
[Daydream Nation] In Skull we trust
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/daydream-nation/in-skull-we-trust
Ce mardi 5 décembre de 22h à 23h, Unckle Al’ passe une sélection de titres issus de la collection personnelle de Skull, avec qui nous avons fondé Daydream Nation radio show en 2008.
Peace, love and rock’n’roll.
La playlist ::
Blew - steam Cringer - Waste away Hopeful monsters - bandaids Marvin - tempo fighting Mr. Marcaille - it’s a lie ! Gum takes tooth - young mustard Germanotta youth - the succubus / goodnight, mankind Subtle turnhips - Antisocial / hip hop Le Singe Blanc - Neudeuls Jesus is my Son - Aux Amazones de la dérobade Bad Drugs - Go Ghost a-go-go Child Abuse - casual Fridays Don Caballero - for (...)
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/daydream-nation/in-skull-we-trust_17064__1.mp3
[A Question Of Wave] # 014 - Cris et hurlements
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/a-question-of-wave/014-cris-et-hurlements
Ni chant d’aliénation, ni ode au désespoir, contre l’évidence, #suicide est le duo d’une #musique ardemment humaine, celle des fragilités, des erreurs, des insuffisances de l’homme, un plaidoyer pour saisir la vie, mais par son revers – un pacte avec le diable, pour sauver l’âme de l’Amérique.
A QUESTION OF WAVE # 014 - playlist 00:00 - [Générique début] The Human League - Being Boiled 01:01 - Suicide - Johnny 03:37 - Suicide - Ghost Rider 07:10 - The Mash - Suicide Is Painless 10:57 - Suicide - Rocket USA 16:06 - Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog 20:28 - New York Dolls - Personality Crisis 25:05 - Suicide - Che 30:59 - Suicide - Cheree 36:18 - Suicide - Frankie Teardrop 48:07 - Suicide - 23 Minutes Over Brussels 50:37 - Suicide - Girl 55:16 - Suicide - Keep Your Dreams 05:40 - Bruce Springsteen - Dream (...)
#post-punk #new_wave #musique,post-punk,suicide,new_wave
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/a-question-of-wave/014-cris-et-hurlements_16148__1.mp3
Critical RCE found in popular Ghostscript open-source PDF library
▻https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-rce-found-in-popular-ghostscript-open-source-pdf-library
Ghostscript, an open-source interpreter for PostScript language and PDF files widely used in Linux, has been found vulnerable to a critical-severity remote code execution flaw.
The flaw is tracked as CVE-2023-36664, having a CVSS v3 rating of 9.8, and impacts all versions of Ghostscript before 10.01.2, which is the latest available version released three weeks ago.
According to Kroll’s analysts, G. Glass and D. Truman, who developed a proof of concept (PoC) exploit for the vulnerability, code execution can be triggered upon opening a malicious, specially-crafted file.
Considering that Ghostscript is installed by default in numerous Linux distributions and used by software such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, ImageMagick, and the CUPS printing system, opportunities to trigger CVE-2023-36664 are abundant in most cases.
Kroll also comments that the problem affects open-source apps on Windows, too, if those use a port of Ghostscript.
[Fade to Pleasure ] #198.4 w/ Snooba
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/ftp/1984-w-snooba-1
Seul, l’art traverse le temps sans aucune douleur en échange..
Weekly Broadcasted & hosted by Snooba on Panik (Brussels-Be) Woot (Marseille) Grenouille (Marseille) Canal B (Rennes-Fr) C’rock (Vienne-Fr) Louiz Radio (Belgique-Louvain la neuve) You FM (Mons-Be) Woot (Marseille) Campus FM (Toulouse-FR)
Ftp 197
Suite Simone – Tranz
Dastic - Fire & Ice (Extended Mix).
Suite Simone - The Sound Of Disco
Nathan Elias - Rock out
styn - shotty
elpac- visions _original_mix
Tal_Fussman - I_Will
More Ghost Than Man - Nine Fingers For Hand
Levin Goes Lightly The Members E-REC_002
Zeynep erba - Dream Of You Exploited
dolan - nsdr.
dolan - doors of perception
ryan clover - stay by my side jerome hill remix
Daniel Avery Going So Low Radio Edit
gen y - rari ack
jam city - redd st turbulence (...)
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/ftp/1984-w-snooba-1_16022__1.mp3
[Fade to Pleasure ] #200.4 w/Snooba
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/ftp/2004-wsnooba
Une heure n’est pas qu’une heure, c’est un vase rempli de parfums, de sons, de projets et de climats.
Weekly Broadcasted & hosted by Snooba on Panik (Brussels-Be) Woot (Marseille) Grenouille (Marseille) Canal B (Rennes-Fr) C’rock (Vienne-Fr) Louiz Radio (Belgique-Louvain la neuve) You FM (Mons-Be) Woot (Marseille) Campus FM (Toulouse-FR)
FTP 200
Fran Lobo Tricks Space Afrika Remix
Iman Houssein - House of Light [BBE Music]
Kyra - Blossom Spring [Only Good Stuff]
John Ghost - The Dimmed
Ekiti Sound – Home
The Matheus Combo - Adericó [Only Good Stuff]
Omotani - With The jazz
e Jazz Omotanis -Original-Mix
Mothers Favorite Child & Saeeda Wright - Purple Funk (Opolopo Instru Remix) [Only Good Stuff
Jason Merle, Sen-Sei - Traduire (French Filter Mix) [Only Good Stuff]
AlexSatry – (...)
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/ftp/2004-wsnooba_16127__1.mp3
How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/23846048/google-search-memes-images-pagerank-altavista-seo-keywords
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24874202/236755_When_Google_ruled_the_world_MRohn_001.jpeg)
he first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.
What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.
This year, The Verge is exploring how Google Search has reshaped the web into a place for robots — and how the emergence of AI threatens Google itself.
What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers?
How Google tried to fix the web — by taking it over
The store is for humans, the storefront is for robots
The little search engine that couldn’t
Who killed Google Reader?
There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.
Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/amjad-iraqi/after-the-flood
Referring to the hospital attack, Rishi Sunak, who also made a publicity visit to Israel, told Parliament: ‘If we don’t treat what comes out of the Kremlin as the gospel truth, we should not do the same with Hamas.’ The West’s distorted notion of the powerful and the powerless in Israel-Palestine has never been clearer.
It is in part because of that response that many Palestinians, to the frustration of some of their supporters, have been unable to contend, at least publicly, with the moral travesty of Hamas’s massacres. As they see it, Hamas inverted the violence of the occupation, inflicting on the oppressor a taste of the suffering it metes out routinely. On the streets and online, many Palestinian activists have dropped the language of diplomacy and stopped appealing to international laws that have failed them. They are no longer willing to accept the amnesiac narrative that says their grievances date to 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their former homeland. Many are tired of apologising for violent resistance, as if violence were not inherent to all anti-colonial struggles. They are tired of Western governments and media that treat their resistance as more egregious than the Israeli occupation, while non-violent acts are deemed antisemitic or decried as ‘terrorism’. For Palestinians, the enemy is and has always been a settler colonial project intent on their erasure. And they fear that Gaza is at this moment on the verge of annihilation.
Hamas’s brutal attack demolished a psychological barrier more surely than it could any physical one. Since the end of the Second Intifada, Israeli society has tried to insulate itself from the military occupation it has imposed for more than half a century, maintaining a bubble punctured only occasionally by rocket barrages from Gaza or shootings in Israeli cities. It is telling that the mass protest movement which has been agitating since January against the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary has kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most Israelis have seemed to believe that the current system could bring them lasting safety.
That bubble has now burst. But the Palestinians are now the objects of the wrath of an Israeli government prepared to destroy Gaza and, if possible, expel its population. The recent – and unprecedented – pro-Palestine demonstrations in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, London, Paris, Washington and elsewhere make clear that millions recognise this moment for what it is and are ready to challenge their governments’ complicity in apartheid and its gruesome logic. But it will take much more than flags waved many miles away to help Palestinians fend off the ghost of Sharon in Gaza.
21 October
‘Digidogs’ are the latest in crime-fighting technology. Privacy advocates are terrified. - POLITICO
▻https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/10/ai-surveillance-robotics-police-privacy-new-york-00110672
Advances in artificial intelligence, surveillance and robotics are putting the stuff of yesteryear’s science fiction into the hands of an ever-growing list of municipalities from New York City to Topeka.
Privacy advocates are worried.
“More departments are using more tools that can collect even more data for less money,” said Albert Fox Cahn, head of the New York City-based watchdog group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “I’m terrified about the idea that we’ll start seeing decades of work to collect massive databases about the public being paired with increasingly invasive AI models to try to determine who and who isn’t a threat.”
Recently, the NYPD drew down $750,000 to purchase two Digidogs, which police officials say will be ideal for hostage situations or entering radioactive or chemically hazardous areas that would be too dangerous for a human.
Under a previous (but short-lived) pilot during the Bill de Blasio administration, a Digidog was deployed during at least two standoffs and, in one instance, was used to deliver food to hostages. In April this year, firefighters deployed a separate Digidog to search for survivors at a lower Manhattan building collapse.
The city’s most recent robot purchase is part of a broader push from Mayor Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat and retired police captain, to incorporate high-tech policing tools into the NYPD’s arsenal, no matter the source of funding.
At the end of a press release announcing the purchase of the Digidogs, for instance, the NYPD sought to assuage a concern grimly indicative of this new era.
“Under the NYPD’s protocols, officers will never outfit a robot to carry a weapon and will never use one for surveillance of any kind,” the department wrote.
It turns out, that’s an important disclaimer.
Companies like Ghost Robotics have already attached sniper rifles to quadruped robots. And in November, the San Francisco legislature voted to give law enforcement robots the authority to use lethal force. The proposal — which would have allowed police to place explosives on automatons in limited circumstances — was reversed after public outcry. But the legislature left the door open to reconsidering the initiative in the future.
Other technology seems to have biases baked into its foundation, with serious implications for communities of color. Facial recognition, for example, has proven to be more susceptible to false identifications when the subject is Black.
The bill would also qualify defendants for pro bono legal representation and would mandate any money seized would go into a general fund, rather than the coffers of law enforcement.
Without diverting the stream of money, Fox Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project warned that the system has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Clearly we are seeing this huge growth in police surveillance, across the board data collection and the use of AI,” he said. “What I fear is that it will become a vicious cycle where police purchase more surveillance software to seize more assets to fund even more surveillance.”
C’est pas sympa, quand les gens qui meurent ont l’âge de ma mère.
Sinon, la version de Melody Nelson mise en scène par Jean-Christophe Averty :
▻https://archive.org/details/polka-Serge-gainsbourg-histoire-de-melody
_000125.jpg)
Babe Alone in Babylone, jeune ado de 13 ans, j’avais acheté la partition pour la jouer au piano et on la chantait avec les copains qui venaient chez moi (les copains préféraient qu’on chante Bassin Street Blues, mais moi j’aimais bien Babe Alone) :
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkb2uv4IZbQ
Jean-claude Vannier à propos de l’histoire de Mélody Nelson
▻http://www.jeanclaudevannier.fr/#/fr/musique
J’ai rencontré Serge Gainsbourg à Londres.
Il logeait dans une petite maison à Chelsea avec Jane, et moi dans une chambre sans dessus dessous à l’hôtel Caddogan, là où Oscar Wilde, un de mes auteurs préférés, passa ses dernières heures de liberté avant d’être jeté en prison.
A l’époque c’était un lieu totalement décadent, mais les lits de travers, les rideaux déchirés, les escaliers branlants, les portes impossible à ouvrir ni à fermer, le bar mythique fréquenté par Edouard VII et ses maîtresses, et où le garçon ratait une fois sur deux le mélange instable et subtil des Irish coffe, m’enchantaient. Aujourd’hui le Caddogan est un palace, et ses riches occupants ignorent certainement qu’un pauvre forçat a dormi là.
Après l’enregistrement de la musique d’un film de Robert Benayoun, que nous avions écrite ensemble, Serge me parle d’un projet, « Melody Nelson ».
Comme j’attends les détails, il me dit : « Je n’ai que le titre. Pas de musiques, pas de paroles, rien. As-tu quelque chose dans tes tiroirs ? »
Je me souviens exactement de l’expression, car j’avais alors compris « As-tu quelque chose de méritoire ? »
J’ai écrit certaines musiques, Serge d’autres, et nous avons conçu toute une suite de chansons.
Il y en avait même une qui s’appelait « Melody au zoo ». C’était un peu « Bécassine à la plage ».
Serge me disait : « à nous deux on est Cole Porter, les paroles et la musique, je suis Cole et tu es Porter ».
Alors nous sommes allé au studio, avec une rythmique composée de Big Jim Sullivan, Vic Flick, Dougie Wright et Herbie Flowers.
Je jouais les claviers et nous avons enregistré une heure de musique.
Toujours pas de texte.
Rentrés à Paris nous avons sélectionné les meilleurs moments, sur lesquels j’ai écrit des cordes, que nous avons enregistrées au studio des Dames avec des musiciens de l’Opéra de Paris.
Ensuite Serge à conçu le texte, l’histoire de Melody Nelson, en s’inspirant de la musique et des cordes.
Il était à l’époque très impressionné par les sonnets héroïques de José Maria de Heredia, et je crois qu’il en reste un parfum, principalement dans « Cargo culte ».
Comme nous n’y connaissions rien ni l’un ni l’autre en automobiles, et à fortiori en Rolls Royce, mon père nous à fourni une liste de noms, où Serge a puisé « Silver Ghost », évidemment.
La sortie du disque a été un échec.
Il y a d’autres documents avec Birkin sur son site.
Henri Tachan est mort le même jour que Jane Birkin. La loose totale.
►https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2023/07/17/henri-tachan-chanteur-a-la-poesie-violente-est-mort_6182381_3382.html
Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. Captured Two Sides of Reagan’s America
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/10/bruce-springsteen-nebraska-born-in-the-usa-reagan-america
C’est bien lui qui a orchestré la répétition générale pour la prise du mur de Berlin par le peuple en 1989. Ronald Reagan n’a fait qu’itérer le geste berlinois obligatoire de chaque président US depuis Kennedy. Le vieil homme n’attirait plus les foules comme son légendaire prédecesseur. C’est Bruce Springsteen qui a injecté le venim de la liberté type USA dans les coeurs lors de son concert à Berlin-Est.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsQS2HbD2c
10.10.2023 by William Harris - Back in the old smug, condescending days, when boyish, prep school–faced conservative intellectuals wore bow ties and peered from lordly heights at pop culture, Washington Post columnist George Will stuffed wads of cotton in his ears and stood through the whole four-hour duration of a Bruce Springsteen concert. He arrived at a stadium in the suburbs of Washington, DC, without knowing how marijuana smelled or what Springsteen’s music sounded like, and emerged, still a bit puzzled about whether he’d been in the company of stoners, feeling as if he had the wind at his back. Here, at last, was a “wholesome cultural portent.” A star without even “a smidgen of androgyny.” An image of an ideal, made-for-Reagan working class. “Rock for the United Steelworkers” that didn’t languish in shuttered-factory blues, or export blame onto the rich, or “whine” and curl into helplessness. Springsteen was a greasy-denim, bandana-sporting dynamo — abruptly muscle-ripped, after a waifish early career — whose power cords and corn-fed “homilies” instructed fans to “‘downsize’ their expectations,” to buckle in for a lifetime of hard work, to embrace “family and traditional values,” and to well up with passion when they saw the stars and stripes.
▻https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiN-7mukU_REYdA_UUaejpJvf5nitRok9
“If all Americans — in labor or management, who make steel or shoes or cars or textiles,” Will wrote in his next column, “made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.” We lived in lazy, profligate times, fearful of the rest of the world’s productive capacity, but Springsteen — the “hardest working white man in show business,” one critic quipped — made music infused with the great American work ethic. It was the summer of 1984, and Springsteen wasn’t the only act on tour: Ronald Reagan, too, was out cruising the country, parading down the campaign trail. Will whispered his way into the president’s ear: it was time for the Republican Party to nourish itself on the hearty blue-collar patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.
Five days after Will’s column came out, the America Prouder, Stronger, Better tour, the follow-up to 1980’s Let’s Make America Great Again campaign, pulled its plush, dollar-soaked bandwagon into the slipshod center of New Jersey. Out came Reagan, striding into the gushy set of a Robert Altman movie. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” he told the crowd. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Seven records in, Springsteen had just released his first truly superstar-level pop album; now he found himself sent off to fight in the culture wars.
Nebraska Death Trip
Young Springsteen wasn’t much for political statements. His first, nervous public pronouncement occurred on stage in 1980, the night after Reagan ascended to the White House. “I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night,” he told the student body at Arizona State University. “But I thought it was pretty frightening.”
Four years later, he hissed out another. After the DC show, the Born in the U.S.A. tour swung through the Rust Belt, stopping in Pittsburgh the night after Reagan’s New Jersey speech. Five songs in, Springsteen paused to let everyone know he’d heard the president’s words. “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he was listening to this one.” Then he launched into the spare, spectral, quickstep acoustic haze of “Johnny 99.”
“Johnny 99” is both classic Springsteen and Bruce way out on the margins: it opens with an auto plant closing and ends with a convict pleading for a judge to exchange his ninety-nine-year sentence for the death penalty. The man’s job left; the bank kept hounding him about his mortgage; things kept boiling, until one night he mixed wine and gin and killed a stranger. All the rusty, nine-to-five New Jersey imagery, familiar from Springsteen’s early albums, returns here, but the old twilight avenues of hope and escape have shut down. No more Chuck Berry, no more open roads, no more hand-me-down vistas of rock ’n’ roll freedom. Just execution lines, judges, cops, cracked dreams, and lowercase bosses.
Gone, too, are the candied sax solos, the glistering piano, the alert straight-time drums, the revving electric melodies of Springsteen’s E Street Band — all subbed out for solo Springsteen, alone and acoustic and austere. And not really even Springsteen — he hides himself beneath a series of character masks, pared down to near invisibility, another nobody on an album filled with rootless, cruel, pummeled lives. Calm, confused murderers, singing from the electric chair; families fraying amid foreign wars and Midwest farm disasters; sad, wonder-filled children, crouching in corn fields below steel-gated, light-spangled mansions. This is the world of Nebraska, Springsteen’s seventh album, released in 1982 at the nadir of a recession let loose by Reagan’s crushing of the labor movement and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s yanking up of the interest rate. An album right on time and out of it, stalking a ghost-thick past.
As Warren Zanes argues in his new book, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the record stands as the essential hinge point in Springsteen’s career, uprooting the far left post of what a Springsteen album might sound like and planting it way out in the hinterland. Nebraska limned one hushed, saturnine, cult-worshipped half of where Springsteen’s music might go. The other half, represented by the huge pop splash of 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., couldn’t have been more different. It traded out noirish black and white for full-on florescent color, ghostly quiet for up-to-date synth and continent-sized snares, authorial vacancy for all Bruce, all the time.
Yet bafflingly, alluringly, these two twinned, polarized albums were cooked up in the same notebooks and studio sessions and even briefly planned together as a double album. The whole of Springsteen, stirring inside one record sleeve. And not just Springsteen: part of the retrospective magnetism of that legendary 1982–84 run is how much of our own time-trapped, culture war–haunted world of feeling still seems to live here, pinched within these wide, confining boundaries. Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A.: two records that caught a view of the future in the rearview.
The ’50s in the ’80s, the ’80s in the ’50s
After The River (1980), the suits at Columbia Records expected Springsteen’s star to keep rising. In the same market-saturating week, he’d already appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and he was coming off his first number-one album and first top-ten single, “Hungry Heart.” His writing had grown starker, more grounded and realist, deepening his music’s air of working-class authenticity without letting go of youth and romanticism — even tacking, at times, toward new frontiers of melody and pop-friendliness. Radio loved him; the live shows rocked all night. Critics poured in prophecies and execs laid down plans. He was half Dylan, half Elvis, born under a blistering James Brown sun — proof that rock ’n’ roll could keep its mainstream middle lane open, post-disco and post-punk.
Back in New Jersey, however, Bruce was planless. A bit mapless, too: few people, bandmates included, really knew where he lived. He’d rented a modest ranch house in Colts Neck, ill-furnished and thick with orange shag carpeting, and fell into a meditative sort of depression. He’d lost touch. His family had long ago packed up for California. He was single. His only friends were his employees. A radio DJ asked him whether he had a life outside of music, and he confessed that he didn’t, really, that he only had one non-biz friend, a guy named Matty who “owns a motorcycle shop.” He sat in the dark at night and watched whichever movies flashed onto his TV, falling into a trance over Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), a fictionalization of the Charles Starkweather murder spree in 1950s Nebraska. He pored over the gothic enigmas of Flannery O’Connor. He paged through WPA-era songbooks of old folk tunes and felt his mood mirrored in the desolate rural world of country and blues. Driving at night through Freehold, the dead-end town where he grew up, he’d stop his car in front of his grandparents’ old ramshackle house — the house he lived in, more or less without parental supervision, suffering and exploiting a kind of terrible freedom, until he was six. In a zig-zag, groping-in-the-dark way, he was working.
Back at home he would sit with his guitar at the edge of his bed and his feet on the orange shag carpet and sing. His roadie, Mike Batlan, had bought him a TEAC 144, a relatively cheap, newish piece of technology that captured multitrack recording on a simple cassette tape. It gave off only a lo-fi sound, but it suited Springsteen’s needs perfectly: he was just sketching, recording drafts that he planned to polish up in a sleek Manhattan studio with the E Street Band. With Batlan as a silent background presence, Springsteen entered a bedroom world of his own, singing rough songs into a cassette. He had no idea that he was recording Nebraska.
The songs came out as confessions, or testimonies, often sung from the perspective of first-person characters and addressed to some unreachable Kafkaesque authority, mixing intimacy and distance. They told stories of loneliness, of people whose communities collapse and whose moral compasses spin out of control: narrators who kill people without much immediate reason, or spend their days haunted by a bittersweet past.
Springsteen approached these characters with a sort of still, low-toned empathy: he presented their lives plainly, without judgment, framed by spare landscapes of context. He could do this because he felt they were a part of him. He, too, lived in a community-less vacuum. He, too, felt called back to a mysterious, melancholic childhood, where the air in his grandparents’ house hung stale with the never-finished grieving of a long-dead daughter, and where the lights in his father’s house were always shut off, obscuring a figure alone in the kitchen, drinking silently each night after long days at the factory.
Springsteen’s childhood memories brought him back to the 1950s, as did much of Nebraska’s source material: the Nebraskan serial killer Charles Starkweather, for instance, who murdered eleven people in the Great Plains between 1957 and ’58, inspired the album’s title and its opening song. These sources conjured up a menacing, alienated, depraved 1950s, a world of seething undercurrents and nighttime despondence far removed from the fizzy fountain drink, drive-in milkshake, jukebox imagery of old-time rock ’n’ roll lore.
This was a 1950s activated by the brash class war of Reagan’s 1980s: farmers in debt, workers fired, communities falling apart. The cusp of a new world. Leftist critics often knock Springsteen for being an unreconstructed New Deal liberal, nostalgic for an idealized set of historical images — proud male breadwinners, cozy class compromise, national glory days — that never really existed. But Nebraska strips the shine off this postwar myth. Spend time with this record, and you start to see the seeds of the neoliberal 1980s scattered all over the disquieting fields of the 1950s.
Bedroom Versus Studio
Really for the first time across the full stretch of an album, Nebraska brought Springsteen’s great mature theme into view: the confusion of public and private, the way the wider social world seeps into our personal lives. Never before had he turned out a suite of songs so thematically unified. Singing on the edge of his bed, Springsteen knew he had something good. But he also knew he had something different — too angular for Columbia Records, too quiet and darkly vulnerable for the E Street Band. And, anyway, he had a range of material, a promising but shaggy draft, much of it sitting oddly against the low-frequency landscape of barren heartland violence. He scribbled a light note, confident and uncertain and jokey, and sent the tape off to his manager, Jon Landau. Landau listened and felt concerned for Springsteen’s mental health — all this strange, bleak, unexpected material. Then he sent the lone copy of the tape back, rallied the band, and booked a studio at the Power Plant in Manhattan.
The sessions sailed. After three weeks they pretty much had an album recorded — the only catch being that the album wasn’t Nebraska. A handful of songs off that cheap, lint-covered cassette had pulled away under the band’s influence, shown the ability to nestle inside the synth-y smash of a snare or a cinematic orchestral swell and transform into something new. Those storm-dark Nebraska clouds parted, and things felt lighter, more electric and anthemic. On the demo tape, “Born in the U.S.A.” came across muted and depressed, a bitter song about a beat-down, jobless Vietnam vet born in a land of broken promises. Once E Street drummer Max Weinberg’s drum-machine-inspired snare crashed its way in, however, the track hit liftoff. It took on color and surge and pop-chart reverb and grew vexing, its music and lyrics waging a bewitching war.
New possibilities opened up, worlds away from anything the rural, recession-haunted demo conjured. Football stadium shows, car commercials, Prince- and Madonna-level fame, a biting lefty protest anthem that George Will, too, might play on repeat. Something everyone might love or resent without anyone, Bruce included, really understanding.
The studio filled up with pop dreams, and Springsteen only felt more confused. The band had worked its magic on a good portion of the cassette, but the majority of its songs stayed reticent. The cleaner, bigger, and more baroque these songs sounded, the more they lost their character. And their characters. As Springsteen says: “Every step I took in trying to make [the songs] better, I lost my people.” The songs and the people they portray only lived if they were given space, left a bit askew — no synth, no polish, just dusty harmonica, dark-fabled glockenspiel, and lonesome lo-fi distance.
In 1982, these jagged songs had Springsteen’s heart. At first, he thought he’d turn out a double album, presenting two radically distinct sides of the same artist: bright, polished rock scored by the E Street Band up against faintly lit solo folk-country. But in the end, he decided to halt the mixing process on the glamorous album that was shaping up to be Born in the U.S.A., and to go somewhere more lonely and baleful: the next Springsteen album was already here, in his pocket, on the cassette tape that he’d mixed with an old waterlogged boom box he’d left sitting on his couch in Colts Neck, half dead after a canoe trip. It would take months to master, proving all but impossible to translate this drugstore-shelf tape to studio-level technology so it could be pressed to vinyl, and impossible, too, to enhance the tape’s sound quality really at all — much more than Springsteen anticipated, the record had to remain quiet and echoey, poor and pebbled and gaunt. But for Nebraska’s fans, many of whom — Bruce included, Zanes reveals — view the album as Springsteen’s best work, contingency and imperfection made the record. The sad hiss of the bedroom trumped the studio’s clean automated perfection.
In a postmodern twist, the sonic texture of this ’50s-haunted, black-and-white-cover rural album offered a view of the future — musically, technologically, socially. Critics trace the origin of lo-fi music back to many possible sources — the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Paul McCartney’s McCartney — but Nebraska remains a perennial contender. A whole grainy, out-of-joint, DIY sound tumbled out of this record — the lean, half-haunted, zombied-out stuff of twenty-first-century nostalgia. A sound that doubled as a new at-home tech, bowling-alone way of life. Back in his bedroom, Springsteen presaged the solitary figure of the DJ, the end of the band, the rusted digital world. Bedroom beats and bedroom depression, thin and tinny and plugged in.
Postmodern Futures
This was the future Springsteen let us glimpse in ’82: communities vacuumed up, the working class in splinters. He returned in 1984 with a new picture. In between he’d suffered a breakdown, drove across the country with his one friend Matty looking for romantic salvation in the quaint communities his music idealized, and finally wound up in Los Angeles. He hid in the city’s anonymity and took on its routines. Therapy. Weight lifting. “I was a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behavior,” he told one biographer.
If Nebraska seemed like an odd-fitting anachronism that surreptitiously captured its era, Born in the U.S.A. was its through-the-looking-glass opposite: a plainly right-on-time album that nevertheless felt retrograde. On its cover, famously, were Springsteen’s Levi-clad ass cheeks, red bandanna hanging from a pocket and the American flag striped in the background. The music videos had him greased up underneath cars, driving into work at oil refineries, and operating huge drills at construction sites. Springsteen picked up Reagan-era imagery, populist and all-American and nostalgia-soaked, and played with it, catching himself in a tangle of ironies along the way: a crystallized, made-for-MTV portrait of the working class styled just as the late-century proletariat frayed into pictureless disorganization.
At best, Bruce in the hard hat offered a partial view of late-century workers; at worst, Born in the U.S.A.’s imagery played right into the Right’s post-’60s culture-war script, pitting flag-draped construction workers against stoned student-radical brats, macho jingoists and ordinary Real Men against down-with-the-patriarchy hysterics. Part of these images’ value lay in their playful showmanship, their wink and feint. But part of their power, too, rested in how they traded on authenticity, leaving the world stranded in a no-man’s-land between scare quotes and grounded belief.
Suspicious critics saw the record as Springsteen’s cynical attempt to cash in on the Reaganite moment. Springsteen countered, in frustration, that he’d been misunderstood, and that hucksters like Reagan and Will had exploited his art. As anyone who listens to the lyrics knows, “Born in the U.S.A.” indicts the US empire in a way few products of American pop culture ever have. The song is “not ambiguous,” Springsteen once said. But meanwhile, as anyone who hears the music and the way Springsteen sings the hook knows, the song traffics also in very different feelings: an unresolved alchemy where invective turns into pride, pride into spent bitterness, all swirled up in a confused, downtrodden euphoria. Contra Springsteen and Will, it’s hard to imagine a more ambiguous song. This is what gives it its power, its troubled cultural endurance.
As an album, Born in the U.S.A. is fun and uneven, a ridiculous stretch of hit after hit that plays well on a road trip but never reaches sustained depth or unity. As a leadoff song, however, festooned with the album’s lightning-rod imagery, “Born in the U.S.A.” haunts more than anything Springsteen’s ever done — in no small part because of the way it bears the mark of the Nebraska demo. You can still hear those ghosts smothered under its snares.
A whiff of ironic prophecy hangs about Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. Between them, these two albums’ joined-at-the-hip contrariness traced the outlines of our postindustrial, “new economy” cultural condition just as it was coming into formation. Somewhere drifting between their opposed sounds stalls a world lonely and backward-looking, image-obsessed and distrustful of images, disarrayed and yet held together by clapped-out archetypes that won’t leave us alone, pinballing around in our culture-war fever dreams. The self-divided compact of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the limit-case extremism of Nebraska: they leave us with the rug-pulling sense that we still don’t understand as much as we think we do, that we live in a cracked world in which identity can be pieced together through anything, shame and neglect mixing with pride.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the future seemed to be stirring in a thousand obvious subterranean musical worlds: the nighttime eeriness of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s Berlin, the plastic mechanical mayhem of Devo’s gray, deindustrial Akron, the cold techno coming out of Detroit, or the gender- and race- synthesizing fun house of Prince’s freaky Paisley Park cyborg pop. And yet some sad, essential part of our time has been better captured by a body of music shorn of any futuristic trace: the neo-trad, contradiction-dense heartland rock of Bruce Springsteen.
Le colonialisme israélien se déploie aussi sur le terrain économique - CONTRETEMPS
▻https://www.contretemps.eu/economie-palestinienne-colonialisme
Taher Labadi 20 décembre 2023
En éclairant les mécanismes de pouvoir multiples qui opèrent dans le champ de l’économie, #Taher_Labadi montre dans cet article que le colonialisme israélien est un système global qui oscille entre expulsion de la population palestinienne, oppression politique et surexploitation, et que l’économie est un terrain privilégié où se déploient les rapports coloniaux.
Taher Labadi est chercheur à l’Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo), à Jérusalem. Ses recherches portent sur l’économie politique de la Palestine, et plus généralement sur l’économie en situation coloniale.
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Penser l’économie palestinienne dans son contexte colonial
La Palestine aura certainement fait couler beaucoup d’encre ces deux derniers mois. Prise entre l’émotion et les injonctions politico-médiatiques, la recherche universitaire s’invitait aussi aux débats pour apporter son éclairage sur une actualité dense et tragique. Moins présente, l’analyse économique aurait dû pourtant retenir notre attention, à la condition toutefois de savoir informer utilement le sujet. La théorie économique dominante, en effet, continue d’appréhender les phénomènes qu’elle étudie en recourant à la seule grammaire du marché, et se trouve par conséquent bien démunie pour penser les conflits et les pouvoirs qui se nouent jusque dans l’économie, où à ses abords immédiats. Tout au plus, ses données agrégées et autres formalismes abstraits nous donnent-ils une estimation des coûts du conflit, ou de l’occupation militaire, et l’on comprend finalement bien trop peu ce que sont l’activité et les processus économiques dans la guerre, et en contexte palestinien.
Or d’importantes controverses parcourent, depuis plus d’une décennie désormais, le champ des études palestiniennes, notamment liées à la mise au point et au choix des outils théoriques et méthodologiques permettant de lire et de dire ce contexte particulier. Cela est aussi vrai de la recherche en économie où l’on a assisté à un retour en force de l’économie politique, dont l’objet n’a plus été le marché ou la croissance mais les rapports de dominations qui se logent et se créent dans l’économie. Cette secousse disciplinaire va ici de pair avec une critique de plus en plus étendue du régime économique établi à la suite des accords d’Oslo en 1993 ainsi que du modèle conceptuel (néolibéral) qui lui est sous-jacent. Une critique qui fait à la fois écho à l’impasse dans laquelle se trouve le projet national palestinien et à l’échec de la « solution à deux États », et se traduisant par une quête de nouveaux cadres d’analyse[1].
Parmi ceux-là, les Settler Colonial Studies (études du colonialisme de peuplement) nous invitent à mettre en cohérence les diverses dominations et violences produites dans les relations du mouvement sioniste, et plus tard d’Israël, à la société palestinienne[2]. Ce cadre a pour avantage notable de remédier à la fragmentation des études palestiniennes qui résulte des ruptures historiques (1948, 1967, 1993) et du morcellement géographique (Cisjordanie, Gaza, Israël, Jérusalem). La comparaison des expériences américaines, sud-africaine, australienne, algérienne et palestinienne a aussi d’intéressant qu’elle tempère le traitement d’exception souvent appliqué à cette dernière. La prise en compte du rapport colonial, enfin, permet de compenser une approche marxiste exclusive qui tend à rabattre tout antagonisme au conflit entre classes sociales. L’examen ici des mécanismes de pouvoir multiples qui opèrent sur le terrain même de l’économie se veut une contribution à la compréhension de la guerre en cours.
L’économie comme terrain de l’élimination et du remplacement
Sur le terrain de l’économie en effet, différentes logiques d’action sont à l’œuvre. La première est une élimination et un remplacement justement caractéristiques des #colonialismes_de_peuplement. Dès la fin du 19ème siècle, le mouvement sioniste entreprend de s’approprier des terres en Palestine pour y installer une nouvelle population de colons. Un processus qui s’accélère avec l’occupation britannique du pays en 1917 puis la mise en place du mandat de la Société des nations. La conquête de l’économie est alors un moyen décisif pour renforcer la démographie juive et s’assurer du contrôle des territoires. Elle s’avère aussi un moyen puissant de déstabilisation de la société arabe palestinienne.
Cette conquête de l’économie trouve son expression très pratique dans l’adoption du mot d’ordre de #Jewish_Land (terre juive) et la création de différents fonds sionistes dédiés à l’achat de terres, dont le Fonds national juif. Appropriées de manière marchande et privée, ces terres sont néanmoins retirées du marché et considérées comme propriétés inaliénables du « peuple juif », ce qui constitue un premier pas vers l’institution d’une souveraineté proprement politique. Plusieurs dizaines de localités palestiniennes disparaissent ainsi avant même l’épisode de la Nakba sous l’effet de la colonisation.
Un second mot d’ordre est celui de #Jewish_Labor (travail juif), lequel consiste à encourager les coopératives agricoles tenues par le mouvement sioniste, puis par extension l’ensemble des employeurs juifs ou britanniques, à prioriser l’emploi de travailleurs juifs. Ces derniers trouvent en effet des difficultés à se faire embaucher, y compris par les patrons juifs qui préfèrent recourir à une main-d’œuvre arabe moins couteuse et plus expérimentée dans le travail de la terre. Le chômage devient un défi majeur et de nombreux colons finissent par repartir en Europe.
Ainsi contrairement à l’idée reçue, la formation des #kibboutz durant la première moitié du 20ème siècle ne doit pas grand-chose à l’importation des idéaux socialistes et bien plus aux impératifs de la colonisation en cours. L’organisation collective et la mise en commun des ressources répondent d’abord à la nécessité de réduire le coût du travail juif face à la concurrence du travail arabe[3]. Les kibboutz sont à cet égard plutôt inspirés des artels russes, des coopératives de vie formées entre travailleurs originaires d’un même lieu afin d’améliorer les chances de survie dans un environnement concurrentiel. Il n’est pas question ici d’opposition, ni même de défection face au capitalisme.
Soutenus par l’Organisation sioniste, les kibboutz permettent une meilleure absorption des colons en même temps qu’une complète exclusion des travailleurs arabes. Et ce n’est que plus tard, une fois les contours coloniaux du kibboutz bien définis et son efficacité économique assurée, que le #mythe_de_communautés_autogérées répondant à un idéal socialiste s’est développé, nourrissant l’imaginaire des nouvelles vagues de colons venus d’Europe. Il reste que les kibboutz ont toujours fourni un contingent plus élevé que la moyenne de combattants et de commandants dans les rangs des organisations paramilitaires sionistes durant toute la période du mandat britannique.
Le syndicat juif de l’#Histadrout créé en 1920 est un autre acteur majeur de cette première conquête de l’économie. Celui-ci est à la tête d’un empire économique colossal composé de colonies agricoles, de coopératives de transport, d’établissements industriels, commerciaux et financiers lesquels sont employés dans la constitution d’enclaves économiques exclusivement juives[4]. Le syndicat va même jusqu’à recruter des « gardiens du travail » qui se rendent sur les chantiers et dans les usines pour intimider les employeurs et les travailleurs et exiger par la menace le débauchage des ouvriers arabes et le recrutement de colons juifs[5]. Cette conquête est donc loin d’être sans violences.
Les mots d’ordre de Jewish Land et de Jewish Labor prévalent encore après la Nakba, puis à la suite de l’occupation de la Cisjordanie et de la bande de Gaza, dans une économie israélienne mobilisée par la colonisation et que structure toujours la prévalence accordée à la population juive. A la différence que l’élimination de la population palestinienne autochtone est désormais soutenue par un appareil étatique, et se voit systématisée par un ensemble de politiques et de lois. Or la spoliation des terres et la ségrégation des habitants n’exclut pas pour autant une politique d’intégration économique visant à tirer parti d’une présence palestinienne inévitable, en même temps qu’elle sert à la contrôler.
Une ségrégation qui facilite l’exploitation économique
Lorsqu’en 1967 Israël s’empare de la Cisjordanie et de la bande de Gaza, ses ambitions annexionnistes sont contrariées par la présence d’environ un million de Palestiniens, laquelle constitue un défi démographique, politique et sécuritaire. L’administration militaire opte alors pour une intégration de facto des nouveaux territoires conquis, tout en refusant la citoyenneté à leurs habitants. Cela lui permet d’établir un système strict de ségrégation et de hiérarchisation des relations entre les deux populations, palestinienne et israélienne. Les mesures employées alors sont à bien des égards comparables à celles qui sont à l’œuvre depuis 1948, en Israël même, face aux Palestiniens dits « de l’intérieur »[6].
Se dégage ici une logique d’exploitation, consistant à tirer le meilleur parti des opportunités offertes par le contrôle des territoires et de leurs habitants. Outre la #mainmise_sur_les_ressources_naturelles (eau, pétrole, gaz…), Israël multiplie les politiques dans l’objectif d’accroître la dépendance économique et ainsi mieux user à son avantage des capitaux, de la force de travail ou encore des marchés de consommation palestiniens. C’est notamment l’administration israélienne qui accorde jusqu’en 1993 les autorisations nécessaires pour construire une maison, forer un puit, démarrer une entreprise, sortir ou entrer sur le territoire, importer ou exporter des marchandises.
Des mesures sont prises pour empêcher toute concurrence palestinienne et encourager au contraire des relations de sous-traitance au profit des producteurs israéliens. L’essor de certaines branches d’activité comme la cimenterie, le textile ou la réparation automobile est de ce fait directement lié aux besoins de l’économie israélienne. De même que les cultures requises par Israël ou destinées à l’exportation vers l’Europe se substituent progressivement à celles plus diversifiées destinées aux marchés local et régional. La population palestinienne devient en retour très largement tributaire des importations en provenance d’Israël pour satisfaire ses propres besoins de consommation.
Cette situation ne change pas fondamentalement après 1993 et la création de l’Autorité palestinienne. Les prérogatives accordées à cette dernière sont constamment remises en cause sur le terrain, et c’est l’administration israélienne qui garde la maitrise des régimes commercial, monétaire et financier, ainsi que des frontières et de la majeure partie des territoires. La zone C, directement sous contrôle militaire israélien et inaccessible au gouvernement palestinien, couvre encore 62% de la Cisjordanie. De 1972 à 2017, Israël a ainsi absorbé 79 % du total des exportations palestinienne et se trouve à l’origine de 81% de ses importations[7].
L’emploi dans l’économie israélienne d’une main-d’œuvre en provenance de Cisjordanie et de Gaza est encore un aspect de cette exploitation coloniale. Régulée par l’administration israélienne qui délivre les permis de circulation et de travail, la présence de ces travailleurs vient compenser une pénurie de main-d’œuvre israélienne, en fonction de la conjoncture et pour des secteurs d’activité précis (principalement le bâtiment, l’agriculture, la restauration). Ainsi la récession économique israélienne entre 1973 et 1976 n’a quasiment pas d’impact sur le chômage israélien et se traduit en revanche par une réduction du nombre de travailleurs palestiniens venant des territoires occupés[8].
Vulnérable, corvéable et révocable à tout moment, cette main-d’œuvre compte en moyenne pour un tiers de la population active palestinienne au cours des décennies 1970 et 1980. Puis le déclenchement de la Première Intifada et les actions de boycott économique engagés par la population palestinienne à la fin des années 1980 incitent l’administration israélienne à réduire drastiquement la présence de ces travailleurs. Ceux-là sont remplacés durant un temps par une main-d’œuvre migrante en provenance d’Asie. Mais le phénomène redevient majeur en Cisjordanie depuis une dizaine d’années et avait même repris ces derniers mois avec la bande de Gaza, malgré le blocus.
En 2023, 160 000 Palestiniens de Cisjordanie – soit 20 % de la population active employée de ce territoire – travaillaient en Israël ou dans les colonies, auxquels s’ajouteraient environ 50 000 travailleurs employés sans permis. On comptait également quelques 20 000 travailleurs en provenance de la bande de Gaza[9]. Ces travailleurs perçoivent un salaire moyen qui représente entre 50 et 75 % de celui de leurs homologues israéliens. Ils sont en outre exposés à la précarité, à la #discrimination et aux abus. Le nombre d’accidents du travail et de décès sur les chantiers de construction est considéré comme l’un des plus élevés au monde[10].
L’économie au service de la contre-insurrection
S’il répond d’abord à une logique d’exploitation de la main-d’œuvre autochtone, l’emploi de travailleurs palestiniens s’avère aussi un excellent moyen de policer la population. Pour obtenir un permis de travail en Israël ou dans les colonies, un Palestinien de Cisjordanie ou de Gaza doit veiller à ce que son dossier soit approuvé par l’administration militaire israélienne. Il doit alors ne pas prendre part à toute activité syndicale ou politique jugée hostile à l’occupation, de même que ses proches parents. Des familles et parfois des villages entiers prennent ainsi garde à ne faire l’objet d’aucune « interdiction sécuritaire » pour ne pas se voir priver du permis de travail israélien.
La dépendance des Palestiniens envers l’économie israélienne participe par conséquent de leur vulnérabilité politique. Une vulnérabilité d’autant plus redoutable que c’est l’administration israélienne qui régule l’accès aux territoires occupés, ou même la circulation en leur sein. La fermeture des points de passage et la restriction du trafic sont alors régulièrement employées comme un moyen de sanction, dans une logique ouvertement contre-insurrectionnelle. La population palestinienne est rapidement menée au bord de l’asphyxie économique, voire maintenue dans un état de crise humanitaire durable comme l’illustre le cas de la bande de Gaza sous blocus depuis 2007.
L’Autorité palestinienne se trouve tout particulièrement exposée face à ce genre de pratique punitive. Ses revenus sont composés en grande partie (67 % en 2017) de taxes collectées par l’administration israélienne, notamment sur les importations palestiniennes. Or celle-ci ponctionne et suspend régulièrement ses reversements en exerçant un chantage explicite. Les recettes du gouvernement palestinien dépendent aussi de l’aide internationale, non moins discrétionnaire et politiquement conditionnée[11]. Une situation qui explique pour beaucoup son incapacité à agir en dehors du terrain balisé par Israël et les bailleurs de fonds.
Cette ingénierie politique et sociale qui passe par l’économie touche également le secteur privé de différentes manières. Ces dernières années ont vu un nombre croissant d’entreprises en Cisjordanie requérir de manière proactive leur intégration au système de surveillance israélien dans l’objectif de bénéficier d’un régime avantageux dans l’exportation de leurs marchandises[12]. En temps normal, une cargaison est acheminée une première fois par camion jusqu’au point de contrôle israélien le plus proche. Là, elle est déchargée pour subir une inspection de plusieurs heures, avant d’être chargée sur un second camion pour être transportée à destination, en Israël même, ou vers un pays tiers.
Les exportateurs palestiniens sont ainsi pénalisés par des coûts élevés de transport, sans parler du temps perdu et des risques de voir les marchandises endommagées par ces procédures fastidieuses. Le nombre de camions, et par conséquent le volume de marchandises transportées, est aussi fortement limité par l’engorgement qu’on observe quotidiennement sur les points de contrôle, à quoi peut s’ajouter la simple décision israélienne de mettre un frein à la circulation à tout moment et pour quelque raison que ce soit. Par contraste, la mise en place de couloirs logistiques, dits « door-to-door », vient considérablement fluidifier et réduire le coût du fret commercial.
Moyennant le suivi d’un protocole strict établi par l’armée israélienne, des entreprises pourront acheminer leurs cargaisons à bon port en ne recourant qu’à un seul camion israélien et sans être inquiétées aux points de contrôle. Elles doivent pour cela aménager une cour fermée et sécurisée pour le chargement, équipée de caméras de surveillance reliées en fil continu au point de contrôle militaire le plus proche. Elles fournissent également des données détaillées sur leurs employés dont le dossier doit aussi être approuvé par l’administration militaire. Enfin, chaque camion est équipé d’un système de localisation GPS permettant la surveillance de l’itinéraire suivi à travers la Cisjordanie.
L’économie palestinienne prise dans une guerre totale
Il est certainement difficile de prendre toute la mesure du bouleversement radical que vivent actuellement les territoires occupés et avec eux, l’activité économique palestinienne. Plusieurs organismes palestiniens ou internationaux s’efforcent déjà de comptabiliser les pertes matérielles de la guerre en cours, et d’évaluer ses répercussions sur le PIB et le chômage palestiniens. Toute solution politique au conflit, dit-on, devra nécessairement s’accompagner d’un volet économique, et l’anticipation des coûts de la reconstruction et de la remise à flot de l’économie palestinienne constitue à chaque nouvelle guerre un gage de réactivité face à l’urgence pour les différentes parties concernées.
Aux destructions en masse causées par les bombardements israéliens s’ajoutent en effet le renforcement du siège sur la bande de Gaza mais aussi sur la Cisjordanie, ainsi que la révocation de tous les permis de travail israéliens, ou encore le retard infligé dans le reversement des taxes à l’Autorité palestinienne. L’institut palestinien MAS évoque à cet égard une récession économique grave dont les effets se font déjà sentir dans le cours de la guerre et qui sera probablement amenée à se prolonger à ses lendemains. Le PIB aurait connu une perte d’au moins 25 % à la fin 2023 tandis que le chômage pourrait atteindre les 30 % de la population active en Cisjordanie, pour 90 % dans la bande de Gaza[13].
Mais nous ne sommes pas là face à un affrontement entre deux États souverains et l’appauvrissement de la population palestinienne, de même que les risques sérieux de famine ne sont pas fortuits. Des rapports publiés à la suite des précédentes guerres confirment la volonté délibérée de l’armée israélienne de s’en prendre aux moyens matériels de subsistance[14]. Il en va de même des restrictions imposées sur le trafic de personnes et de marchandises, lesquelles ne s’appliquent pourtant pas aux agriculteurs de Cisjordanie dont les productions sont venues suppléer à l’interruption de l’activité agricole en Israël et ainsi participer à son effort de guerre.
Cette multiplicité des mécanismes à l’œuvre et les diverses logiques de pouvoir qu’ils recouvrent montrent que l’économie n’est pas une victime collatérale de l’affrontement colonial en cours mais en constitue bien un terrain privilégié. La question dès lors n’est pas vraiment celle des coûts de la guerre et de la reconstruction, pas plus qu’elle ne devrait être celle des points de croissance à gagner pour remporter le silence des populations. Mais elle est plutôt celle des moyens à mettre en œuvre pour prémunir la société palestinienne d’une dépossession, d’un enrôlement ou encore d’un assujettissement qui se produisent dans l’économie même, et contre une guerre qui se veut plus que jamais totale.
*
Illustration : « Les toits de Jérusalem », 2007. Sliman Mansour, peintre palestinien.
Notes
[1] Taher Labadi, 2020, « Économie palestinienne : de quoi parle-t-on (encore) ? », Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 147 | 2020, DOI : ▻https://doi.org/10.4000/remmm.14298
[2] Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, Sobhi Samour (ed.), 2012, Past is Present : Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Settler colonial studies, Hawthorn.
[3] Shafir Gershon, 1989, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882 – 1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[4] Sternhell Zeev, 2004, Aux origines d’Israël : entre nationalisme et socialisme, Fayard, Paris.
[5] George Mansour, 1936, The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, Jerusalem.
[6] Aziz Haidar, 1995, On the margins : the Arab population in the Israeli economy, New York, St. Martin’s Press.
[7] CNUCED, 2018, Rapport sur l’assistance de la CNUCED au peuple palestinien : évolution de l’économie du territoire palestinien occupé, 23 juillet, Genève.
[8] Leila Farsakh, 2005, Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel : Labor, Land and Occupation, Routlege, London.
[9] MAS, 2023, How To Read the Economic and Social Implications of the War on Gaza, Gaza War Economy Brief Number 4, Ramallah.
[10] CNUCED, op. cit.
[11] Taher Labadi, 2023, Le chantage aux financements européens accable la Palestine, OrientXXI URL : ▻https://orientxxi.info/magazine/le-chantage-aux-financements-europeens-accable-la-palestine,6886
[12] Walid Habbas et Yael Berda, 2021, « Colonial management as a social field : The Palestinian remaking of Israel’s system of spatial control », Current Sociology, 1 –18.
[13] MAS, op. cit.
[14] UN, 2009, Rapport de la Mission d’établissement des faits de l’Organisation des Nations Unies sur le conflit de Gaza.
Bibliographie indicative
Anaheed Al-Hardan, « Decolonizing Research on Palestinians : Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practices, » Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 1 (2014), pp. 61–71
Rana Barakat, « Writing/Righting Palestine Studies : Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History, » Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 3 (2018), pp. 349–363 ;
Toufic Haddad, Palestine Ltd. : Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory, London/New York : I. B. Taurus and Co. Ltd., 2016.
Adam Hanieh, « Development as Struggle : Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine, » Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 45, no. 4 (2016), pp. 32-47
Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba : Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, London/New York : Zed Books, 2012.
Omar Shweiki and Mandy Turner, dirs., Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy : De-development and Beyond, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Linda Tabar [et al.], Critical Readings of Development under Colonialism : Towards a Political Economy for Liberation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Ramallah : Rosa Luxemburg Foundation/Center for Development Studies, 2015.
Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, and Timothy Seidel, ed., Political Economy of Palestine : Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives, Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Lorenzo Veracini, « The Other Shift : Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation, » Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013), pp. 26–42.
Patrick Wolfe, « Purchase by Other Means : The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, » Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), pp. 133-171.
Omar Jabary Salamanca [et al.], eds., Past is Present : Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (2012).
#colonialisme_israélien_terrain_économique #main-d’œuvre_palestinienne #révocation_des_permis_de_travail_en_Israël #corruption_de_l’Autorité_palestinienne
Il costo nascosto dell’avocado e le nuove “zone di sacrificio” nelle mire dei grandi produttori
La produzione globale del frutto viaggia verso le 12 milioni di tonnellate nel 2030. Le monocolture intensive interessano sempre più Paesi, compromettendo falde e biodiversità. Dalla Colombia allo Sri Lanka, dal Vietnam al Malawi. Grain ha analizzato la paradigmatica situazione del Messico, dove si concentra il 40% della produzione.
“La salsa guacamole che viene consumata durante il Super bowl potrebbe riempire 30 milioni di caschi da football”. La stima è di Armando López, direttore esecutivo dell’Associazione messicana dei coltivatori, confezionatori ed esportatori di avocado, che in occasione della finale del campionato di football americano del 12 febbraio scorso ha pagato quasi sette miliardi di dollari per avere uno spazio pubblicitario in occasione dell’evento sportivo più seguito degli Stati Uniti.
Solo pochi giorni prima, il 2 febbraio, era stata presentata una denuncia contro il governo del Messico presso la Commissione trilaterale per la cooperazione ambientale (organismo istituito nell’ambito dell’accoro di libero scambio tra il Paese, Stati Uniti e Canada) per non aver fatto rispettare le proprie leggi sulla deforestazione, la conservazione delle acque e l’uso del suolo.
La notizia ha trovato spazio per qualche giorno sui media statunitensi proprio per la concomitanza con il Super bowl, il momento in cui il consumo della salsa a base di avocado tocca il picco. Ed è anche il punto partenza del report “The avocados of wrath” curato da Grain, rete di organizzazioni che lavorano per sostenere i piccoli agricoltori e i movimenti sociali, e dall’organizzazione messicana Colectivo por la autonomia, che torna a lanciare l’allarme sull’altissimo costo ambientale di questo frutto.
La denuncia presentata alla Commissione trilaterale si concentra sulla situazione nello Stato del Michoacán, che produce il 75% degli avocado messicani. Qui tra il 2000 e il 2020 la superficie dedicata alla coltura è passata da 78mila a 169mila ettari a scapito delle foreste di abeti locali. Oltre alla deforestazione, il documento pone in rilievo lo sfruttamento selvaggio delle risorse idriche, oltre a un uso eccessivo di fertilizzanti e pesticidi che compromettono le falde sotterranee, i fiumi e i torrenti nelle aree limitrofe alle piantagioni.
“Il Messico non riesce ad applicare efficacemente le sue leggi ambientali per proteggere gli ecosistemi forestali e la qualità dell’acqua dagli impatti ambientali negativi della produzione di avocado nel Michoacán”, denunciano i curatori. Il Paese nordamericano “non sta rispettando le disposizioni della Costituzione messicana e le varie leggi federali sulla valutazione dell’impatto ambientale, la conservazione delle foreste, lo sviluppo sostenibile, la qualità dell’acqua, il cambiamento climatico e la protezione dell’ambiente”.
Questa vicenda giudiziaria, di cui non si conoscono ancora gli esiti, rappresenta per Grain un’occasione per guardare più da vicino il Paese e la produzione dell’avocado, diventato negli ultimi anni il terzo frutto più commercializzato al mondo, dopo banana e ananas: nel 2021 la produzione globale di questo frutto, infatti, ha raggiunto quota 8,8 milioni di tonnellate (si stima che possa raggiungere le 12 milioni di tonnellate nel 2030) e il 40% si concentra proprio in Messico, una quota che secondo le stime della Fao potrebbe arrivare al 63% entro il 2030.
Statunitensi ed europei importano circa il 70% della produzione globale e la domanda è in continua crescita anche per effetto di intense campagne di marketing che ne promuovono i benefici nutrizionali. Di conseguenza dal 2011 a oggi le piantagioni di avocado hanno moltiplicato per quattro la loro superficie in Paesi come Colombia, Haiti, Marocco e Repubblica Dominicana. In Sri Lanka la superficie è aumentata di cinque volte. La produzione intensiva è stata avviata anche in Vietnam e Malawi che oggi rientrano tra i primi venti produttori a livello globale.
Il mercato di questo frutto vale circa 14 miliardi di dollari e potrebbe toccare i 30 miliardi nel 2030: “La maggiore quota di profitti -riporta Grain- vanno a una manciata di gruppi imprenditoriali, fortemente integrati verticalmente e che continuano a espandersi in nuovi Paesi, dove stanno aprendo succursali”. È il caso, ad esempio, delle società californiane Misison Produce e Calvaro Growers. La prima ha aumentato costantemente le sue vendite nel corso degli ultimi anni, fino a superare di poco il miliardo dollari nel 2022, mentre la seconda ha registrato nello stesso anno vendite per 1,1 miliardi.
“Queste aziende hanno basato la loro espansione su investimenti da parte di pesi massimi del mondo della finanza -scrive Grain-. Mission Produce e Calavo Growers sono quotate alla Borsa di New York e stanno attirando investimenti da parte di fondi hedge come BlackRock e Vanguard. Stiamo assistendo all’ingresso di fondi di private equity e fondi pensione nel settore degli avocado. Mission Produce, ad esempio, si è unita alla società di private equity Criterion Africa partners per lanciare la produzione di oltre mille ettari di avocado a Selokwe, in Sudafrica”.
Per Grain guardare da vicino a quello che è accaduto in Messico e al modello produttivo messo in atto dalle aziende dell’agribusiness californiane è utile per comprendere a pieno i rischi che incombono sui Paesi che solo in anni recenti hanno avviato la coltivazione del frutto. Lo sguardo si concentra in particolare sullo Stato del Michoacán dove il boom delle piantagioni è avvenuto a scapito della distruzione delle foreste locali, consumando le risorse idriche di intere regioni e a un costo sociale altissimo.
Secondo i dati di Grain, ogni ettaro coltivato ad avocado in Messico consuma circa 100mila litri di acqua al mese. Si stima che Perù, Sudafrica, Cile, Israele e Spagna utilizzino 25 milioni di metri cubi d’acqua, l’equivalente di 10mila piscine olimpioniche, per produrre gli avocado importati nel Regno Unito. “Mentre continua a spremere le ultime falde già esaurite in Messico, California e Cile, l’industria del settore sta migrando verso altre ‘zone di sacrificio’ -si legge nel report-. Per irrigare l’arida Valle di Olmos in Perù, dove operano le aziende californiane, il governo locale ha realizzato uno dei megaprogetti più contestati e segnati dalla corruzione del Paese: un tunnel di venti chilometri che attraversa la cordigliera delle Ande per portare l’acqua deviata dal fiume Huancabamba a Olmos”. All’eccessivo sfruttamento delle risorse idriche si aggiunge poi il massiccio utilizzo di prodotti chimici nelle piantagioni: nel solo Michoacán, la coltura dell’avocado si porta dietro ogni anno 450mila litri di insetticidi, 900mila tonnellate di fungicidi e 30mila tonnellate di fertilizzanti.
▻https://altreconomia.it/il-costo-nascosto-dellavocado-e-le-nuove-zone-di-sacrificio-nelle-mire-
#avocat #agriculture #Mexique #globalisation #mondialisation #cartographie #visualisation #Michoacán #déforestation #produits_phytosanitaires #fertilisants #pesticides #plantation #fruits #Misison_Produce #Calvaro_Growers #multinationales #financiarisation #bourse #hedge_funds #private_equity #Criterion_Africa #industrie_agro-alimentaire #eau #Pérou #Huancabamba #Olmos #exploitation #insecticides
The Avocados of Wrath
This little orchard will be part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner. This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries too... Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten… In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
So wrote John Steinbeck when, perhaps for the first time, the immense devastation provoked by capitalist agribusiness, the subsequent expulsion of peasant families from the Midwest, and their arrival in California in the 1930s became visible.[1] Perhaps, if he were writing today, he would replace grapes with avocados. The business model for this popular tropical fruit is the epitome of agribusiness recrudescent, causing rampant deforestation and water diversion, the eradication of other modes of agriculture, and the expulsion of entire communities from the land.
Avocados are, after bananas and pineapples, the world’s third-largest fruit commodity. Their production is taking up an ever-growing area and continually expanding into new countries. What are the implications of this worldwide expansion? What forces are driving it? How does this model, working on both global and local scales, manage to keep prices high? How did the current boom, with avocados featured at major sporting events and celebrations of all kinds, come to pass? What are the social repercussions of this opaque business?
We begin the story on 12 February 2023 in Kansas City at the 57th Super Bowl, American football’s premier annual event. A month earlier, more than 2000 km away in Michoacán, Mexico, tens of thousands of tons of avocados were being packed for shipping. The United States imports 40% of global avocado production and the Super Bowl is when consumption peaks. “The guacamole eaten during the Super Bowl alone would fill 30 million football helmets,” says Armando López, executive director of the Mexican Association of Avocado Growers, Packers, and Exporters (APEAM), which paid nearly $7 million for a Super Bowl ad.[2]
Despite its limited coverage in US media, the dark side of avocado production was the unwelcome guest at this year’s event. A complaint against the Government of Mexico had recently been filed with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation under the USMCA, accusing the government of tolerating the ecocidal impacts of avocado production in Michoacán.[3]
Mexico can be seen as a proving ground for today’s avocado industry. Focusing on this country helps tell the story of how the avocado tree went from being a relic of evolutionary history to its current status as an upstart commodity characterized by violence and media-driven consumerism.
Booming world production
For a decade now, avocados have been the growth leaders among tropical fruit commodities.[4] Mexico, the world’s largest exporter, accounts for 40% of total production. According to OECD and FAO projections, this proportion could reach 63% in 2030. The United States absorbs 80% of Mexican avocado exports, but production is ramping up in many other countries.
In 2021, global production reached 8.8 million tons, one third of which was exported, for a value of $7.4 billion. By 2030, production is expected to reach 12 million tons. Within a decade, the average area under cultivation doubled in the world’s ten largest producer countries (see Figure 1). It quadrupled in Colombia, Haiti, Morocco, and the Dominican Republic, and quintupled in Zimbabwe. Production has taken off at a gallop in Malawi and Vietnam as well, with both countries now ranking among the top 20 avocado producers.
The top 10 countries account for 80% of total production. In some of these, such as Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Kenya (see Table 1), the crop is largely grown for export. Its main markets are the United States and Europe, which together make up 70% of global imports. While Mexico supplies its neighbour to the north all year long, the avocados going to Europe come from Peru, South Africa, and Kenya in the summer and from Chile, Mexico, Israel, and Spain in the winter.[5] The Netherlands, as the main port of entry for the European Union, has become the world’s third-leading exporter.
Other markets are rapidly opening up in Asia. Kenya, Ethiopia, and recently Tanzania have begun exporting to India and China,[6] while Chinese imports from Peru, Mexico, and Chile are also on the rise. In 2021, despite the pandemic, these imports surpassed 41,000 tons.[7] In addition, US avocado companies have begun cutting costs by sourcing from China, Yunnan province in particular.[8]
The multimillion dollar “#green_gold” industry
According to some estimates, the global avocado market was worth $14 billion in 2021 and could reach $30 billion by 2030.[10] The biggest profits go to a handful of vertically integrated groups that are continuing to fan out to new countries, where they are setting up subsidiaries. They have also tightened their control over importers in the main global hubs.
For two examples, consider the California-based Mission Produce and Calavo Growers. In 2021, Mission Produce reported sales equivalent to 3% of global production,[11] and its sales have risen steadily over the last decade, reaching $1.045 billion in 2022.[12] The United States buys 80% of the company’s volume, with Europe, Japan, and China being other large customers, and it imports from Peru, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, and Israel. It controls 8600 hectares in Peru, Guatemala, and Colombia.[13]
Calavo Growers, for its part, had total sales of $1.191 billion in 2022.[14] More than half its revenues came from packing and distribution of Mexican, US, Peruvian, and Colombian avocados.[15] The United States is far and away its biggest market, but in 2021 it began stepping up Mexican exports to Europe and Asia.[16]
South Africa-based Westfalia Fruits is another relevant company in the sector. It has 1200 hectares in South Africa and is expanding to other African and Latin American countries. It controls 1400 hectares in Mozambique and has taken over large exporters such as Aztecavo (Mexico), Camet (Peru), and Agricom (Chile).[17] Its main markets are Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia.[18] Some of its subsidiaries are incorporated in the tax haven of Delaware, and it has acquired importers in the UK and Germany.[19]
These companies have based their expansion on investment from heavyweight players in the world of finance. Mission Produce and Calavo Growers are listed on the New York Stock Exchange and are attracting investment from such concerns as BlackRock and The Vanguard Group.[20] We are also seeing private equity, endowment, and pension funds moving into avocados; Mission Produce, for example, joined with private equity firm Criterion Africa Partners to launch production of over 1000 hectares of avocados in Selokwe (South Africa).[21]
In 2020, Westfalia sold shares in Harvard Management Company, the company that manages Harvard University’s endowment fund.[22] Also involved is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which in 2017 acquired Australia’s second-largest avocado grower, Jasper Farms. PSP Investments, which manages Canada’s public service sector pensions, made a controversial acquisition of 16,500 hectares in Hawaii for production of avocado, among other crops, and faces grave accusations deriving from its efforts to monopolize the region’s water supply.[23]
Finally, it has to be emphasized that the expansion enjoyed by these companies has been aided by public funding. For example, South Africa’s publicly owned Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) have supported Westfalia’s incursions into Africa and Latin America under the guise of international development.[24]
A proving ground for profit and devastation
To take the full measure of the risks looming over the new areas being brought under the industrial avocado model, it is important to read Mexico as a proving ground of sorts. The country has become the world’s largest producer through a process bound up with the dynamics of agribusiness in California, where avocado production took its first steps in the early twentieth century. The US market grew rapidly, protected from Mexican imports by a 1914 ban predicated on an alleged threat of pests coming into the country.
This was the genesis of Calavo Growers (1924) and Henry Avocado (1925). California began exporting to Europe and expanding the area under cultivation, reaching a peak of 30,000 hectares in the mid-1980s, when Chile began competing for the same markets.[29] It was then that consortia of California avocado producers founded West Pak and Mission Produce, and the latter of these soon began operations as an importer of Chilean avocados. In 1997, 60% of US avocado purchases came from Chile, but the business collapsed with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).[30] Lobbying by APEAM and the US companies then led to the lifting of the ban on Mexican imports. With liberalization under NAFTA, Mexican avocado exports multiplied by a factor of 13, and their commercial value by a factor of 40, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
The California corporations set up subsidiaries in Mexico and began buying directly from growers, going as far as to build their own packing plants in Michoacán.[31] One study found that by 2005, Mission Produce, Calavo Growers, West Pak, Del Monte, Fresh Directions, and Chiquita had cornered 80% of US avocado imports from Mexico.[32]
Today, the state of Michoacán monopolizes 75% of the nation’s production, followed by Jalisco with 10% and Mexico state with 5%.[33] In 2019, export-oriented agriculture was a high-profile player in the industry, with public policies being structured around its needs. And if the business had become so profitable, it was because of the strategies of domination that had been deployed by avocado agribusiness and the impacts of these strategies on peasant and community ways of life.[34] The Mexican avocado boom is now reliant on the felling of whole forests. In many cases these are burned down or clear-cut to make way for avocado groves, using up the water supply of localities or even whole regions. The societal costs are enormous.
In 2021, Mexico produced some 2.5 million tons of avocados; within the preceding decade, nearly 100,000 hectares had been directly or indirectly deforested for the purpose.[35] In Michoacán alone, between 2000 and 2020, the area under avocados more than doubled, from 78,530.25 to 169,939.45 ha.[36] And reforestation cannot easily repair the damage caused by forest destruction: the ecological relationships on which biodiversity depends take a long time to evolve, and the recovery period is even longer after removal of vegetation, spraying of agrotoxins, and drying of the soil.
In Jalisco, the last decade has seen a tripling of the area under avocado, agave, and berries, competing not only with peasants and the forests stewarded by original peoples, but also with cattle ranchers.[37] “Last year alone,” says Adalberto Velasco Antillón, president of the Jalisco ranchers’ association, “10,000 cattlemen (dairy and beef) went out of business.”[38]
According to Dr. Ruth Ornelas, who studies the avocado phenomenon in Mexico, the business’s expansion has come in spite of its relative cost-inefficiency. “This is apparent in the price of the product. Extortion garners 1.4% of total revenues,… or 4 to 6 pesos per kilogram of avocados.” It is a tax of sorts, but one that is collected by the groups that control the business, not by the government.[39] According to Francisco Mayorga, minister of agriculture under Vicente Fox and Enrique Calderón, “they collect not only from the farmer but from the packer, the loggers, the logging trucks and the road builders. And they decide, depending on the payments, who gets to ship to Manzanillo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán and Jalisco. That’s because they have a monopoly on what is shipped to the world’s largest buyer, the United States.”[40]
By collecting this toll at every link in the chain, they control the whole process, from grower to warehouse to packer to shipper, including refrigeration and the various modes of distribution. And not only do they collect at every step, but they also keep prices high by synchronizing supply from warehouse to consumer.
Dr. Ornelas says, “They may try to persuade people, but where that doesn’t work, bribes and bullets do the trick. Organized crime functions like a police force in that it plays a certain role in protecting the players within the industry. It is the regulatory authority. It is the tax collector, the customs authority, and the just-in-time supplier. Sadly, the cartels have become a source of employment, hiring halcones [taxi drivers or shoeshine boys working as spies], chemists, and contract killers as required. It seems that they even have economists advising them on how to make the rules.” Mayorga adds: “When these groups are intermingled with governmental structures, there is a symbiosis among growers, criminals, vendors, and input suppliers. If somebody tries to opt out of the system, he may lose his phytosanitary certification and hence his ability to export.” Mayorga stresses that the criminals administer the market and impose a degree of order on it; they oversee the process at the domestic and international levels, “regulating the flow of product so that there is never a glut and prices stay high.” Investment and extortion are also conducive to money laundering. It is very hard to monitor who is investing in the product, how it is produced, and where it is going. Yet the government trumpets avocados as an agri-food success.
Official data indicate that there are 27,712 farms under 10 hectares in Michoacán, involving 310,000 people and also employing 78,000 temporary workers.[41] These small farms have become enmeshed in avocado capitalism and the pressures it places on forests and water; more importantly, however, the climate of violence keeps the growers in line. In the absence of public policy and governmental controls, and with organized crime having a tight grip on supply chains and world prices, violence certainly plays a role in governance of the industry. But these groups are not the ones who run the show, for they themselves are vertically integrated into multidimensional relationships of violence. It is the investors and large suppliers, leveraged by the endowment, pension, and private equity funds, who keep avocado production expanding around the world.[42]
A headlong rush down multiple paths
The Mexican example alerts us to one of the main problems associated with avocado growing, and that is water use. In Mexico, each hectare consumes 100,000 litres per month, on top of the destruction of the biodiverse forests that help preserve the water cycle.[46] A whole other study ought to be devoted to the indiscriminate use of agrotoxins and the resulting groundwater contamination. In Michoacán alone, the avocado crop receives 450,000 litres of insecticides, 900,000 tons of fungicides, and 30,000 tons of fertilizers annually.[47]
Wherever they are grown, avocados consume an astonishing volume of water. An estimated 25 million m³, or the equivalent of 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, are estimated to be used by Peru, South Africa, Chile, Israel, and Spain to produce the avocados imported into the UK.[48]
California has maintained its 90% share of the US avocado market, but this situation is not predicted to endure beyond 2050.[49] California’s dire water crisis has been driven to a significant extent by the industrial production of avocados and other fruits, with climate change exacerbating the problem.[50]
In the Chilean province of Petorca, which accounts for 60% of Chile’s avocado exports, the production of one kilogram of avocados requires 1280 litres of water. Water privatization by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1981 coincided with the rise of the country’s export industry and abetted the development of large plantations, which have drained the rivers and driven out peasant farming.[51] This appears to be one of the reasons why Chile is no longer self-sufficient in this commodity. “We import more than we export now,” said the director of Mission Produce, Steve Barnard, two years ago, stating that avocados were being brought in not only from Peru but also from California.[52]
Even as it continues to squeeze the last drops of water out of depleted aquifers in Mexico, California, and Chile, the industry is migrating into other sacrifice zones.[53] To water the arid Olmos Valley in Peru, where California’s avocado companies operate, the Peruvian government developed one of the country’s most corrupt and conflict-ridden megaprojects: a 20-km tunnel through the Andes range, built in 2014, to deliver water diverted from the Huancabamba River to Olmos. The project was sold as an “opportunity to acquire farmland with water rights in Peru.”[54]
Colombia was the next stop on the avocado train, with the crop spreading out across Antioquia and the coffee-growing region, and with even large mining interests joining forces with agribusiness.[55] “Peru is destined to replace much of its avocado land with citrus fruit, which is less water-intensive,” said Pedro Aguilar, manager of Westfalia Fruit Colombia, in 2020, although “water is becoming an absolutely marvelous investment draw, since it is cost-free in Colombia.”[56]
Sowing the seeds of resistance
If Mexico has been an experiment in devastation, it has also been an experiment in resistance, as witness the inspiring saga of the Purépecha community of Cherán, Michoacán. In 2012, the community played host to a preliminary hearing of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal that condemned land grabbing, deforestation, land conversion, agrotoxin spraying, water depletion, fires, and the widespread violence wielded against the population. It laid the blame for these plagues squarely on timber theft, the avocado industry, berry greenhouses, and agave production.
–—
One year earlier, the population had decided to take matters in hand. They were fed up with this litany of injustices and with the violence being inflicted on them by the paramilitary forces of organized crime. Led by the women, the community took up the arduous task of establishing checkpoints marked out by bonfires (which were also used for cooking) throughout the area. Any institution or group that questioned their collective authority was immediately confronted. The newly created community police force is answerable to the general assembly, which in turn reports to the neighbourhood assemblies. A few years ago, the community gated itself to outsiders while working on restoring the forest and establishing its own horizontal form of government with respect for women, men, children, and elders.
The community then took another step forward, opting for municipal and community autonomy. This was not a straightforward process, but it did finally lead to approval by the National Electoral Institute for elections to take place under customary law and outside the party system. This example spread to other communities such as Angahuan that are also grappling with agribusiness, corruption, and organized crime.[57]
Clearly, this struggle for tradition-rooted self-determination is just beginning. The cartels, after all, are pursuing their efforts to subdue whole regions. Meanwhile, for their own defence, the people are continuing to follow these role models and declaring self-government.
An unsustainable model
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but … men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.”[58]
Per capita consumption of avocados has kept on growing in the importing countries, driven by intense marketing campaigns promoting the nutritional benefits of this food. In the United States alone, consumption has tripled in 20 years.[59] While avocados are sold as a superfood, a convenient veil remains thrown over what is actually happening at the local level, where the farmers are not the ones benefiting. While this global trend continues, various false solutions are proposed, such as water-saving innovations or so-called “zero deforestation” initiatives.
In this exploitative model, small- and medium-sized growers are forced to take on all the risk while also bearing the burden of the environmental externalities. The big companies and their investors are largely shielded from the public health and environmental impacts.
As we have said, the growers are not the ones who control the process; not even organized crime has that power. They are both just cogs in the industrial agri-food system, assisting the destruction it wreaks in order to eke out a share of the colossal dividends it offers. To truly understand the workings of the system, one has to study the supply chain as a whole.
Given these realities, it is urgent for us to step up our efforts to denounce agribusiness and its corrupting, devastating model. The people must organize to find ways out of this nightmare.
* Mexico-based Colectivo por la Autonomía works on issues related to territorial defence and peasant affairs, through coordination with other Mexican and Latin American social movement organizations, as well as legal defence and research on the environmental and social impacts experienced by indigenous and rural territories and communities.
Banner image: Mural in Cherán that tells the story of their struggle. This mural is inside the Casa Comunal and is part of a mural revival throughout the city, where there are collective and individual works in many streets and public buildings. This mural is the work of Marco Hugo Guardián Lemus and Giovanni Fabián Gutiérrez.
[1] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Penguin Classics, 1939, 2006.
[2] Guillermina Ayala, “López: “Un Súper Bowl con guacamole,” Milenio, 11 February 2023, ▻https://www.milenio.com/negocios/financial-times/exportaciones-de-toneladas-de-aguacate-para-la-final-de-la-nfl.
[3] The USMCA is the trade agreement between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. See also Isabella González, “Una denuncia lleva a la producción mexicana de aguacate ante la comisión ambiental del T-MEC por ecocidio,” El País, 8 February 2023, ▻https://elpais.com/mexico/2023-02-08/una-denuncia-lleva-a-la-produccion-mexicana-de-aguacate-ante-la-comision-amb.
[4] In what follows, the sources for production volumes, areas under cultivation, and sales are the FAOSTAT and UN Comtrade databases [viewed 25 January 2023]. The source for 2030 projections is OECD/FAO, OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2021–2030, 2021, ▻https://doi.org/10.1787/19428846-en.
[5] Ruben Sommaruga and Honor May Eldridge, “Avocado Production: Water Footprint and Socio-economic Implications,” EuroChoices 20(2), 13 December 2020, ▻https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-692X.12289.
[6] See George Munene, “Chinese traders plan on increasing Kenyan avocado imports,” Farmbiz Africa, 1 August 2022, ▻https://farmbizafrica.com/market/3792-chinese-traders-plan-on-increasing-kenyan-avocado-imports; Tanzania Invest, “Tanzania sign 15 strategic agreements with China, including avocado exports,” 5 November 2022, ▻https://www.tanzaniainvest.com/economy/trade/strategic-agreements-with-china-samia.
[7] USDA, "China: 2022 Fresh Avocado Report, 14 November 2022, ▻https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/china-2022-fresh-avocado-report.
[8] Global AgInvesting, “US-based Mission Produce is developing its first domestic avocado farm in China,” 8 June 2018, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/28223-us-based-mission-produce-is-developing-its-first-domestic-avocad.
[9] Wageningen University & Research, “Improved mango and avocado chain helps small farmers in Haiti,” 2022, ▻https://www.wur.nl/en/project/improved-mango-and-avocado-chain-helps-small-farmers-in-haiti-1.htm.
[10] See Grand View Research, “Avocado market size, share & trends analysis report by form (fresh, processed), by distribution channel (B2B, B2C), by region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Central & South America, MEA), and segment forecasts, 2022–2030,” 2022, ▻https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/fresh-avocado-market-report; Straits Research, “Fresh avocado market,” 2022, ▻https://straitsresearch.com/report/fresh-avocado-market.
[11] Mission Produce, “Mission Produce announces fiscal 2021 fourth quarter financial results,” 22 December 2021, ▻https://investors.missionproduce.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mission-produce-announces-fiscal-2021-fourth-quarter-finan.
[12] Sources: Capital IQ and United States Securities and Exchange Commission, “Mission Produce: Form 10-K,” 22 December 2022, ▻https://investors.missionproduce.com/financial-information/sec-filings?items_per_page=10&page=.
[13] The company reports that it has had avocado plantations since 2011 on three Peruvian farms covering 3900 ha, in addition to producing blueberries on 400 hectares (including greenhouses) as part of a joint venture called Moruga. See Mission Produce, “Investor relations,” December 2022, ▻https://investors.missionproduce.com; United States Securities and Exchange Commission, “Mission Produce: Form 10-K,” 22 December 2022, ▻https://investors.missionproduce.com/financial-information/sec-filings?items_per_page=10&page=1, and ▻https://missionproduce.com/peru.
[14] Sources: ▻https://ir.calavo.com; Calavo Growers, “Calavo Growers, Inc. announces fourth quarter and fiscal 2021 financial results,” 20 December 2021, ▻https://ir.calavo.com/news-releases/news-release-details/calavo-growers-inc-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2021
[15] Its main subsidiaries in Mexico are Calavo de México and Avocados de Jalisco; see Calavo Growers, Calavo Growers, Inc. Investor Presentation, 12 December 2022, ►https://ir.calavo.com/static-files/f4ee2e5a-0221-4b48-9b82-7aad7ca69ea7; United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Calavo Growers, Inc. form 10-K, December 2022, ▻https://ir.calavo.com/static-files/9c13da31-3239-4843-8d91-6cff65c6bbf7.
[16] Among its main US clients are Kroger (15% of 2022 total sales), Trader Joe’s (11%), and Wal-Mart (10%) Source: Capital IQ. See also “Calavo quiere exportar aguacate mexicano a Europa y Asia,” El Financiero, 8 January 2021, ▻https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/opinion/de-jefes/calavo-quiere-exportar-aguacate-mexicano-a-europa-y-asia.
[17] See IDC, “Westfalia grows an empire,” 2018, ▻https://www.idc.co.za/westfalia-grows-an-empire; IFC, Creating Markets in Mozambique, June 2021, ▻https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/a7accfa5-f36b-4e24-9999-63cffa96df4d/CPSD-Mozambique-v2.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CVID=nMNH.3E; ▻https://www.westfaliafruit.com/about-us/our-operations/westfalia-fruto-mocambique; “Agricom y Westfalia Fruit concretan asociación en Latinoamérica,” Agraria.pe, 9 January 2018, ▻https://agraria.pe/noticias/agricom-y-westfalia-fruit-concretan-asociacion-en-latinoamer-15664.
[18] Marta del Moral Arroyo, “Prevemos crecer este año un 20% en nuestras exportaciones de palta a Asia y Estados Unidos,” Fresh Plaza, 27 May 2022, ▻https://www.freshplaza.es/article/9431020/prevemos-crecer-este-ano-un-20-en-nuestras-exportaciones-de-palta-a-asia-.
[19] See ▻https://opencorporates.com/companies?jurisdiction_code=&q=westfalia+fruit&utf8=%E2%9C%93.
[20] For example, in the case of Calavo Growers, BlackRock controls 16%, Vanguard Group 8%, and five other investment 20%; see Capital IQ, “Nuance Investments increases position in Calavo Growers (CVGW),” Nasdaq, 8 February 2023, ▻https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nuance-investments-increases-position-in-calavo-growers-cvgw; “Vanguard Group increases position in Calavo Growers (CVGW),” Nasdaq, 9 February 2023, ▻https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/vanguard-group-increases-position-in-calavo-growers-cvgw.
[21] Liam O’Callaghan, “Mission announces South African expansion,” Eurofruit, 8 February 2023, ▻https://www.fruitnet.com/eurofruit/mission-announces-south-african-expansion/248273.article. Criterion Africa Partners invests with funds from the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO) (Source: Preqin).
[22] Harvard Management Company subsequently spun out its holdings in Westfalia to the private equity fund Solum Partners; see Lynda Kiernan, “HMC investment in Westfalia Fruit International to drive global expansion for avocados,” Global AgInvesting, 17 January 2020, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/29422-hmc-investment-in-westfalia-fruit-international-to-drive-global-; Michael McDonald, “Harvard spins off natural resources team, to remain partner,” Bloomberg, 8 October 2020, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/29894-harvard-spins-off-natural-resources-team-to-remain-partner.
[23] See “Ontario Teachers’ acquires Australian avocado grower Jasper Farms,” OTPP, 19 December 2017, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/27774-ontario-teachers-acquires-australian-avocado-grower-jasper-farms; “Canadian pension fund invests in ex-plantation privatizing Hawaii’s water,” The Breach, 23 February 2022, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/30782-canadian-pension-fund-invests-in-ex-plantation-privatizing-hawai.
[24] See ▻https://disclosures.ifc.org/enterprise-search-results-home/42280; ▻https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/SII/40091/westfalia-intl. Westfalia is a subsidiary of the South African logging company Hans Merensky Holdings (HMH), whose main shareholders are the Hans Merensky Foundation (40%), IDC (30%), and CFI (20%) (see ▻https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/SII/42280/westfalia-moz-ii).
[25] Amanda Landon, “Domestication and significance of Persea americana, the avocado, in Mesoamerica,” Nebraska Anthropologist, 47 (2009), ▻https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://en.wikipedia.org/&httpsredir=1&article=1046&context=nebanthro.
[26] Ibid., 70.
[27] Jeff Miller, Avocado: A Global History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), ▻https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo50552476.html.
[28] Maria Popova, “A ghost of evolution: The curious case of the avocado, which should be extinct but still exists,” The Marginalian, ▻https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/12/04/avocado-ghosts-of-evolution/?mc_cid=ca28345b4d&mc_eid=469e833a4d, citing Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms, ▻https://books.google.com.mx/books/about/The_Ghosts_Of_Evolution.html?id=TnU4DgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y.
[29] Patricia Lazicki, Daniel Geisseler, and Willliam R. Horwath, “Avocado production in California,” UC Davis, 2016, ▻https://apps1.cdfa.ca.gov/FertilizerResearch/docs/Avocado_Production_CA.pdf.
[30] Flavia Echánove Huacuja, “Abriendo fronteras: el auge exportador del aguacate mexicano a United States,” Anales de Geografía de la Universidad Complutense, 2008, Vol. 28, N° 1, ▻https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/aguc/article/download/aguc0808110009a/30850.
[31] Calavo Growers, Calavo Growers, Inc. Investor Presentation, 12 December 2022, ►https://ir.calavo.com/static-files/f4ee2e5a-0221-4b48-9b82-7aad7ca69ea7.
[32] Flavia Echánove Huacuja, op cit., the evolution of these companies in the sector was different. Chiquita withdrew from the avocado industry in 2012, while for Del Monte, this fruit accounts for a steadily declining share of its sales, reaching 8% ($320 million) in 2021 (see ▻https://seekingalpha.com/article/1489692-chiquita-brands-restructuring-for-value; United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. Form 10-K, 2022; Del Monte Quality, A Brighter World Tomorrow, ▻https://freshdelmonte.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/FDM_2021_SustainabilityReportFINAL.pdf. )
[33] Source: SIAP (►http://infosiap.siap.gob.mx/gobmx/datosAbiertos_a.php) [viewed 27 November 2022].
[34] María Adelina Toribio Morales, César Adrián Ramírez Miranda, and Miriam Aidé Núñez Vera, “Expansión del agronegocio aguacatero sobre los territorios campesinos en Michoacán, México,” Eutopía, Revista de Desarrollo Económico Territorial, no. 16, December 2019, pp. 51–72, ▻https://revistas.flacsoandes.edu.ec/eutopia/article/download/4117/3311?inline=1.
[35] Enrique Espinosa Gasca states: “The Ministry of the Environment, Natural Resources, and Climate Change (Semadet) in Michoacán acknowledged in March 2019 that in the first twenty years of the millennium, Michoacán has lost a million hectares of its forests, some due to clandestine logging and some due to forest fires set for purposes of land conversion”; “Berries, frutos rojos, puntos rojos,” in Colectivo por la Autonomía and GRAIN, eds, Invernaderos: Controvertido modelo de agroexportación (Ceccam, 2021).
[36] Gobierno de México, SIACON (2020), ▻https://www.gob.mx/siap/documentos/siacon-ng-161430; idem, Servicio de Información Agroalimentaria y Pesquera (SIAP), ►http://infosiap.siap.gob.mx/gobmx/datosAbiertos_a.php.
[37] “Se triplica cosecha de agave, berries y aguacate en Jalisco,” El Informador, 23 December 2021, ▻https://www.informador.mx/Se-triplica-cosecha-de-agave-berries-y-aguacate-en-Jalisco-l202112230001..
[38] María Ramírez Blanco, “Agave, berries y aguacate encarece precio de la tierra en Jalisco, roba terreno al maíz y al ganado,” UDG TV, 31 January 2023, ▻https://udgtv.com/noticias/agave-berries-aguacate-encarece-precio-tierra-jalisco-roba-maiz.
[39] Agustín del Castillo, Territorio Reportaje, part 8, “Negocio, ecocidio y crimen,” Canal 44tv, Universidad de Guadalajara, October 2022, ▻https://youtu.be/WfH3M22rrK8
.
[40] Agustín del Castillo, Territorio Reportaje, part 7, “La huella criminal en el fruto más valioso del mundo: la palta, el avocado, el aguacate,” Canal 44tv, Universidad de Guadalajara, September 2022, ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSz8xihdsTI.
[41] Gobierno de México, Secretaría de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, “Productores de pequeña escala, los principales exportadores de aguacate a Estados Unidos: Agricultura,” 29 January 2020, ▻https://www.gob.mx/agricultura/prensa/productores-de-pequena-escala-los-principales-exportadores-de-aguacate-a-estados.
[42] Our results and arguments coincide with those found in Alexander Curry, “Violencia y capitalismo aguacatero en Michoacán,” in Jayson Maurice Porter and Alexander Aviña, eds, Land, Markets and Power in Rural Mexico, Noria Research. Curry is skeptical of analyses in which violence can be understood in terms of its results, such as the coercive control of a market square or highway. “Such analyses forget that violence is part of a social process, with its own temporal framework,” he writes. It is therefore necessary to frame the process within a broader field of relations of inequality of all kinds, in which the paradox is that legal and illegal actors intermingle at the local, national, and international levels, but in spheres that rarely intersect. The avocado industry cannot be explained by the cartels but by the tangled web of international capitalism.
[43] See ▻https://www.netafim.com.mx/cultivos/aguacate and ▻https://es.rivulis.com/crop/aguacates.
[44] Jennifer Kite-Powell, “Using Drip Irrigation To Make New Sustainable Growing Regions For Avocados”, Forbes, 29 March 2022: ▻https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2022/03/29/using-drip-irrigation-to-make-new-sustainable-growing-regions-for-avocados .
[45] See Pat Mooney, La Insostenible Agricultura 4.0: Digitalización y Poder Corporativo en la Cadena Alimentaria, ETC Group, 2019, ▻https://www.etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/files/files/la_insostenible_agricultura_4.0_web26oct.pdf. See also Colectivo por la Autonomía and GRAIN, eds, Invernaderos: controvertido modelo de agroexportación.
[46] Colectivo por la Autonomía, Evangelina Robles, José Godoy, and Eduardo Villalpando, “Nocividad del metabolismo agroindustrial en el Occidente de México,” in Eduardo Enrique Aguilar, ed., Agroecología y Organización Social: Estudios Críticos sobre Prácticas y Saberes (Monterrey: Universidad de Monterrey, Editorial Ítaca, 2022), ▻https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365173284_Agroecologia_y_organizacion_social_Estudios_criticos_sobre_p.
[47] Metapolítica, “La guerra por el aguacate: deforestación y contaminación imparables,” BiodiversidadLA, 24 June 2019, ▻https://www.biodiversidadla.org/Noticias/La-guerra-por-el-Aguacate-deforestacion-y-contaminacion-imparables.
[48] Chloe Sutcliffe and Tim Hess, “The global avocado crisis and resilience in the UK’s fresh fruit and vegetable supply system,” Global Food Security, 19 June 2017, ▻https://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/global-avocado-crisis-resilience-uks-fresh-fruit-vegetable-supply-sy.
[49] Nathanael Johnson, “Are avocados toast? California farmers bet on what we’ll be eating in 2050,” The Guardian, 30 May 2016, ▻https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/30/avocado-california-climate-change-affecting-crops-2050.
[50] GRAIN, “The well is running dry on irrigated agriculture,” 20 February 2023, ▻https://grain.org/en/article/6958-the-well-is-running-dry-on-irrigated-agriculture.
[51] Danwatch, “Paltas y agua robada,” 2017, ▻http://old.danwatch.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Paltas-y-agua-robada.pdf.
[52] Fresh Fruit Portal, “Steve Barnard, founder and CEO of Mission Produce: We now import more to Chile than we export,” 23 August 2021, ▻https://www.freshfruitportal.com/news/2021/08/23/steve-barnard-founder-and-ceo-of-mission-produce-we-now-import-mor.
[53] Sacrifice zones are “places with high levels of environmental contamination and degradation, where profits have been given priority over people, causing human rights abuses or violations”: Elizabeth Bravo, “Zonas de sacrificio y violación de derechos,” Naturaleza con Derechos, Boletín 26, 1 September 2021, ▻https://www.naturalezaconderechos.org/2021/09/01/boletin-26-zonas-de-sacrificio-y-violacion-de-derechos.
[54] See Catalina Wallace, “La obra de ingeniería que cambió el desierto peruano,” Visión, March 2022, ▻https://www.visionfruticola.com/2022/03/la-obra-de-ingenieria-que-cambio-el-desierto-peruano; “Proyecto de irrigación Olmos,” Landmatrix, 2012, ▻https://landmatrix.org/media/uploads/embajadadelperucloficinacomercialimagesstoriesproyectoirrigacionolmos201. The costly project was part of the Odebrecht corruption case fought in the context of the “Lava Jato” operation: Jacqueline Fowks, “El ‘caso Odebrecht’ acorrala a cuatro expresidentes peruanos,” El País, 17 April 2019, ▻https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/04/16/america/1555435510_660612.html.
[55] Liga contra el Silencio, “Los aguacates de AngloGold dividen a Cajamarca,” 30 October 2020, ▻https://www.biodiversidadla.org/Documentos/Los-aguacates-de-AngloGold-dividen-a-Cajamarca.
[56] “Colombia: Los aguacates de AngloGold dividen a Cajamarca,” La Cola de Rata,16 October 2020, ▻https://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/29921-colombia-los-aguacates-de-anglogold-dividen-a-cajamarca.
[57] See Las luchas de Cherán desde la memoria de los jóvenes (Cherán Ireteri Juramukua, Cherán K’eri, 2021); Daniela Tico Straffon and Edgars Martínez Navarrete, Las raíces del despojo, U-Tópicas, ▻https://www.u-topicas.com/libro/las-raices-del-despojo_15988; Mark Stevenson, “Mexican town protects forest from avocado growers and drug cartels,” Los Angeles Times, ▻https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-01-31/mexican-town-protects-forest-from-avocado-growers-cartels; Monica Pellicia, “Indigenous agroforestry dying of thirst amid a sea of avocados in Mexico,” ▻https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/indigenous-agroforestry-dying-of-thirst-amid-a-sea-of-avocados-in-mex
[58] The Grapes of Wrath, op. cit.
[59] USDA, “Imports play dominant role as U.S. demand for avocados climbs,” 2 May 2022, ▻https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=103810.