Film geographies is a forum that includes everything related to films and geography. We stream films made by geographers, and films about geography. We offer a space where films cannot just be peer reviewed, but they can also be interpreted by viewers.
This short animated film introduces the concept of spatial justice to general audiences, with particular reference to #Edward_Soja ’s work. The purpose of the short is to show the distributive geographic dimensions of place and justice by illustrating choices that affect every person and every space: the uneven accessibility of services and amenities, the impacts of byproducts, and economic vulnerabilities. The film concludes with ways to improve spatial justice, ranging from individual actions such as supporting the localization of food production to broader societal imperatives of improving sustainable infrastructure in remote communities.
▻https://www.filmgeographies.com/video/social-justice/what-is-spatial-justice
#justice_spatiale #Soja
GRAIN — The Belt and Road Initiative: Chinese agribusiness going global
▻https://www.grain.org/article/entries/6133-the-belt-and-road-initiative-chinese-agribusiness-going-global
One of the world’s biggest e-commerce companies, Beijing-based JD.com, says it will soon be able to deliver fruit from anywhere in the world to the doorsteps of Chinese consumers within 48 hours. It takes highly integrated global infrastructure—connecting farms to warehouses to transportation to consumers—to achieve a goal like this. China’s new mega-infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), will help make JD.com’s vision a reality. It will also increase the concentration of global food production and distribution, potentially pushing small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, forest peoples and rural communities further to the margins. There are also serious concerns that BRI could worsen land grabs, human rights abuses, indebtedness, and environmental and health impacts in target countries.
Pas encore regardé #obor #BRI #Chine #commerce #agroindustrie #route_de_la_soie #nouvelle_route_de_la_soie
The changing face of food retail in India
▻https://www.cetri.be/The-changing-face-of-food-retail
To date, there is little reliable evidence to back the claims that corporate food retail will enhance food security and employment. Global experience shows that supermarkets tend to restructure food production and markets to cater to expanding global value chains and international markets. In India, such restructuring will undermine territorial markets that are vital to the survival and well-being of majority of the population, particularly (...)
#Southern_Social_Movements_Newswire
/ #Le_Sud_en_mouvement, #Inde, #Néolibéralisme, #Alimentation
The strategies of the coalition in the yeman War.
Aerial bombardment and food war.
PDF : ▻https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2018/10/Strategies-of-Coalition-in-Yemen-War.pdf
This report gives an overview not available elsewhere of the impact
of the Coalition bombing campaign on food production and
distribution in rural Yemen and on fishing along the Red Sea coast.
The timing of its release appears opportune. Press coverage of this
forgotten war has increased; there is some diplomatic and political
movement; and the report on human rights violations during the
Yemen war, prepared under the aegis of the Group of Eminent Experts, has been submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.¹
Warnings of the risk of mass starvation echo ever more shrilly.²
It is high time that citizens, parliamentarians and civil organisations
to do all they can to end a conflict now well into its fourth year. On
the 6 September, a new UN-appointed mediator had announced
discussions between two major Yemeni parties in the war (the internationally
recognized Government of Yemen led by Abd-Rabbuh
Mansour Hadi, based between al-Riyadh and Aden, and the “Salvation/Rescue Government” of Ansarallah and allies based in Sanʿaʾ, internationally designated as “the Houthi rebels” or “the de-facto power”). Following this announcement, the talks were postponed in the wake of a failure to provide certain safe passage for the delegation from Sanʿaʾ.
Mounting civilian casualties and recent atrocities resulting from
Coalition bombing have brought press and political reaction to
this long war.³ As part of the attack begun in June 2018 with the
objective of taking the city of al-Hudayda, on 2 August the central
fish market and the entrance to the main public hospital (to which
wounded persons were being taken) were attacked.⁴ In the week
A Local Food Revolution in Puerto Rico
▻https://foodtank.com/news/2018/10/a-local-food-revolution-in-puerto-rico
The story of Puerto Rico’s food production is also the story of the island’s own colonial history. Large-scale plantations replaced native farming during Puerto Rico’s days as a Spanish colony, resulting in the consolidation of agricultural land and landholding, as well as the number of crops being grown on it. When the United States took over the island in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898, economic restructuring meant that the remaining agricultural activity focused only on cash crops like sugarcane and coffee.
Then, in the 1940s, Congress launched Operation Bootstrap, a campaign to overhaul the Puerto Rican economy that focused on manufacturing and tourism—moving even further away from agriculture. Subsequent tax breaks and economic initiatives to encourage investment in these sectors solidified these moves. Deliberately, over the course of years, an import-driven food system was put in place in Puerto Rico, and all other farming fell by the wayside.
“Puerto Rico’s economy has always been categorized by being an import economy: we produce things we do not consume but then we have to import things we do consume, especially in agriculture,” notes Gladys González-Martínez, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Puerto Rico.
Still, Puerto Rican local farming had been experiencing the beginning stages of a renaissance even before the storm hit, spurred by the economic crisis of 2006. According to statistics provided by the governor’s office, farm income grew 25 percent from 2012 to 2014, while the number of acres under cultivation rose by 50 percent between 2012 and 2016, generating at least 7,000 jobs.
We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup
We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status quo.
Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted.
Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.
The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.
Retailers likely to face backlash for failing to curb plastic use, survey finds
Don’t get me wrong. Our greed for plastic is a major environmental blight, and the campaigns to limit its use are well motivated and sometimes effective. But we cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping one overused resource for another. When I challenged that call, some people asked me, “So what should we use instead?”
The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.
Part of the problem is the source of the plastic campaigns: David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series. The first six episodes had strong, coherent narratives but the seventh, which sought to explain the threats facing the wonderful creatures the series revealed, darted from one issue to another. We were told we could “do something” about the destruction of ocean life. We were not told what. There was no explanation of why the problems are happening and what forces are responsible, or how they can be engaged.
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Amid the general incoherence, one contributor stated: “It comes down, I think, to us each taking responsibility for the personal choices in our everyday lives. That’s all any of us can be expected to do.” This perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume. Unfortunately, these are issues that the BBC in general and David Attenborough in particular avoid. I admire Attenborough in many ways, but I am no fan of his environmentalism. For many years, it was almost undetectable. When he did at last speak out, he avoided challenging power – either speaking in vague terms or focusing on problems for which powerful interests are not responsible. This tendency may explain Blue Planet’s skirting of the obvious issues.
The most obvious is the fishing industry, which turns the astonishing life forms the rest of the series depicted into seafood. Throughout the oceans, this industry, driven by our appetites and protected by governments, is causing cascading ecological collapse. Yet the only fishery the programme featured was among the 1% that are in recovery. It was charming to see how Norwegian herring boats seek to avoid killing orcas, but we were given no idea of how unusual it is.
Even marine plastic is in large part a fishing issue. It turns out that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch – which has come to symbolise our throwaway society – is composed of discarded nets, and much of the rest consists of other kinds of fishing gear. Abandoned fishing materials tend to be far more dangerous to marine life than other forms of waste. As for the bags and bottles contributing to the disaster, the great majority arise in poorer nations without good disposal systems. But because this point was not made, we look to the wrong places for solutions.
From this misdirection arise a thousand perversities. One prominent environmentalist posted a picture of the king prawns she had bought, celebrating the fact that she had persuaded the supermarket to put them in her own container rather than a plastic bag, and linking this to the protection of the seas. But buying prawns causes many times more damage to marine life than any plastic in which they are wrapped. Prawn fishing has the highest rates of bycatch of any fishery – scooping up vast numbers of turtles and other threatened species. Prawn farming is just as bad, eliminating tracts of mangrove forests, crucial nurseries for thousands of species.
We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can promote meaningful change.
The answer to the question “How should we live?” is: “Simply.” But living simply is highly complicated. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.
One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.
As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state, concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.”
Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.
Atlas of Forest and Landscape Restoration Opportunities | World Resources Institute
▻http://www.wri.org/resources/maps/atlas-forest-and-landscape-restoration-opportunities
Over the last several centuries, vast forest areas have been cleared as agriculture has spread and human populations have grown. About 30 percent of global forest cover has been completely cleared and a further 20 percent has been degraded. Breaking the spiral of loss and degradation and restoring these lands would bring many benefits.
Restored lands support livelihoods and biodiversity by supplying clean water, reducing erosion, providing wildlife habitat, biofuel, and other forest products. Forests and trees mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon. Trees in agricultural landscapes can enhance soil fertility, conserve soil moisture, and boost food production.
More than two billion hectares worldwide offer opportunities for restoration---an area larger than South America. Most of these lands are in tropical and temperate areas.
▻http://www.wri.org/applications/maps/flr-atlas/#
#forêt #déforestation #restauration #cartographie
The victory of Mozambican farmers against the soya empire
In 2011 the Mozambican government launched Africa’s largest agro-industrial development plan. The so-called #ProSavana aimed to turn 14 million hectares of land in the #Nacala corridor, in the north of the country, into a huge #monoculture, mainly soybean for the Chinese market. The development of the area would have been entrusted to Brazilian entrepreneurs coming directly from Mato Grosso.
When they realized they would have lost their ancestral lands, local farmers put up a great mobilisation, which proved very successful.
▻https://www.internazionale.it/video/2018/05/16/mozambican-farmers-soya
#résistance #Mozambique #agriculture #soja #Chinafrique #Chine #Brésil #terres #accaparement_de_terres #vidéo
I n a world struck by climate change and overpopulation, food production control is increasingly becoming a huge business for a handful of giant corporations. Following the industrial production chain of pork, from China to Brazil through the United States and Mozambique, the documentary describes the enormous concentration of power in the hands of these Western and Chinese companies. This movement is putting out of business hundreds of thousands of small producers and transforming permanently entire landscapes. Launched in United States at the end of the Seventies, the system has been exported across the world, especially in large-populated countries such as China. From waste-lagoons in North Carolina to soybeans monoculture developed in the Amazon rainforest to feed animals, the movie describes how the expansion of this process is jeopardizing the social and environmental balance of the planet.
#film
La vittoria dei contadini del Mozambico contro l’impero della soia
“In Mozambico non c’è abbastanza terra, abbiamo già conflitti tra di noi. Se verranno gli investitori stranieri, i conflitti peggioreranno. La terra appartiene ai mozambicani”, dice Costa Estevão, presidente dell’unione contadina di Nampula.
Nel 2011 il governo mozambicano ha lanciato il più grande piano di sviluppo agroindustriale dell’Africa. Il ProSavana mirava a trasformare 14 milioni di ettari di terreno in monocolture da esportazione. L’area interessata era il corridoio di Nacala, nel nord del paese.
Il suo sviluppo sarebbe stato affidato a imprenditori brasiliani venuti dal Mato Grosso, lo stato del Brasile trasformato negli anni ottanta nel principale produttore di soia al mondo. I contadini mozambicani, informati che avrebbero perso le proprie terre, hanno messo in piedi una grande mobilitazione e hanno vinto.
Questo video, disponibile anche in inglese, è stato realizzato con il sostegno del Pulitzer center on crisis reporting. È uno spin-off di Soyalism, un documentario di Stefano Liberti ed Enrico Parenti sull’industria globale della carne e le monocolture correlate in giro per il pianeta.
▻https://www.internazionale.it/video/2018/05/16/contadini-mozambico-soia
#vidéo
The Agrifood Atlas: how corporations are tightening their stranglehold on people’s food | Friends of the Earth Europe
▻http://www.foeeurope.org/agrifood-atlas-corporations-stranglehold-food-311117
New research published today shows the dramatic impacts of the global food system being rapidly monopolised by ever-fewer, ever-larger corporations at every stage of the food chain. This alarming trend poses risks to consumer choice, jobs and working conditions and food production in the future, warn the authors of the Agrifood Atlas.
Between 2015 and 2016, five of the largest 12 mergers between publicly-traded companies came in the agrifood sector, with a total value of almost US $500 billion.
The authors raise concerns that the growing consolidation in the food chain is causing:
Less consumer choice: increased monopolies are putting the food chain into even fewer hands. Almost half of all food sold in the EU comes from just ten supermarket chains and 50 food processing companies account for half of all global food sales. Only four companies produce 60% of the world’s baby food.
A risk to future food production: merged agrifood corporations are driving industrialisation along the whole food chain, with 20% of the world’s agricultural land now degraded.
Job cuts and low wages: The current wave of mergers in the processing industries – such as Kraft-Heinz and AB Inbev-SAB Miller – were driven by cost saving calculations, and led to thousands of job cuts.
Price pressure through buyers’ cartels: Food retailers and processors put pressure on their suppliers, squeezing out smaller producers, and poor working conditions and low pay exist along the food chain. Around 80% of the global tea market is controlled by just three corporations.
A situation where the poorest stay hungry despite an oversupply of food. The global harvest of edible crops is today equal to around 4,600 kcal per person per day – but more than half of this is lost in storage, via distribution, food waste and being fed to livestock.
▻http://www.foeeurope.org/sites/default/files/agriculture/2017/agrifood_atlas.pdf
#atlas #cartographie #visualisation #alimentation #agriculture
The Best Burger Place Is a Lab - Issue 51: Limits
▻http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/the-best-burger-place-is-a-lab
Picture this. Sitting at the dinner table 50 years from now, you explain to your grandchildren that meat was once grown on living beings—who were bred, fed, transported, slaughtered, and carved up—all for a meal that could be contaminated with harmful pathogens, growth hormones, and antibiotic residue. You’re met with expressions of confusion and disgust as they contemplate such a costly, cruel, and resource-intensive method of food production. Moments later, you all tuck into dinner—sausages made at the local meat brewery by feeding cow cells nutrients inside tall, steel bioreactors. It may sound like an excerpt from a futuristic science-fiction story, but it’s a scenario that could become reality sooner than we think. And that’s a good thing. To say current day meat production is (...)
Brexit and the coming food crisis: ‘If you can’t feed a country, you haven’t got a country’
Britain’s food production depends on seasonal migrant labour from the EU. What will happen to those workers after Brexit? And how will it change the industry?
#alimentation #Brexit #UK #Angleterre #migrations #travail #saisonniers #migration_saisonnière #agriculture #industrie_agro-alimentaire
cc @odilon
Groundwater depletion embedded in international food trade : Nature : Nature Research
▻http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7647/full/nature21403.html
Recent hydrological modelling1 and Earth observations2, 3 have located and quantified alarming rates of groundwater depletion worldwide. This depletion is primarily due to water withdrawals for irrigation1, 2, 4, but its connection with the main driver of irrigation, global food consumption, has not yet been explored. Here we show that approximately eleven per cent of non-renewable groundwater use for irrigation is embedded in international food trade, of which two-thirds are exported by Pakistan, the USA and India alone. Our quantification of groundwater depletion embedded in the world’s food trade is based on a combination of global, crop-specific estimates of non-renewable groundwater abstraction and international food trade data. A vast majority of the world’s population lives in countries sourcing nearly all their staple crop imports from partners who deplete groundwater to produce these crops, highlighting risks for global food and water security. Some countries, such as the USA, Mexico, Iran and China, are particularly exposed to these risks because they both produce and import food irrigated from rapidly depleting aquifers. Our results could help to improve the sustainability of global food production and groundwater resource management by identifying priority regions and agricultural products at risk as well as the end consumers of these products.
#eau #aquifère #irrigation #dataviz
téléchargeable ici
▻http://sci-hub.io/10.1038/nature21403
#Tohono_O'odham tribal members opposing Trump’s border wall take fight to McCain
TUCSON — Tohono O’odham Nation tribal members took their fight against President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall to one of the president’s most high-profile Republican critics, lining up Thursday outside the Tucson office of Arizona Sen. John McCain.
#résistance #murs #barrières_frontalières #USA #Etats-Unis #peuples_autochtones
The Border / La Frontera
For the native nations living along the US-Mexico border, the border is a barbed wire fence through their living room. Over the course of generations, they’ve formed connections on both sides of the border, and yet they’re considered foreigners and illegal immigrants in their ancestral homelands. In the O’odham language, there is no word for “state citizenship.” No human being is illegal.
In this map, the territories of the #Kumeyaay, #Cocopah, #Quechan, #Tohono_O’odham, #Yaqui, #Tigua, and #Kickapoo are shown straddling the 2,000 mile border, with the red dots along the border representing official border crossings.
No wall
The Tohono O’odham have resided in what is now southern and
central Arizona and northern Mexico since time immemorial.
The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 divided the Tohono O’odham’s
traditional lands and separated their communities. Today, the
Nation’s reservation includes 62 miles of international border.
The Nation is a federally recognized tribe of 34,000 members,
including more than 2,000 residing in Mexico.
Long before there was a border, tribal members traveled back
and forth to visit family, participate in cultural and religious
events, and many other practices. For these reasons and many
others, the Nation has opposed fortified walls on the border for
many years.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QChXZVXVLKo
A Standing Rock on the Border?
Tohono O’odham activist #Ofelia_Rivas has a reputation for clashing with U.S. Border Patrol. On her tribe’s 4,500-square-mile reservation, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border, that can be a stressful vocation. But she doesn’t show it, sharing conversational snippets and a slight, quick grin. Her skin is the color of stained clay, and she cuts a stylish figure: narrow glasses and a red-flecked scarf trailing in the slight breeze. Her black sneakers are gray with dust.
How Border Patrol Occupied the Tohono O’odham Nation
In March 2018, Joaquin Estevan was on his way back home to Sells, Ariz., after a routine journey to fetch three pots for ceremonial use from the Tohono O’odham community of Kom Wahia in Sonora, Mexico (where he grew up)—a trek his ancestors have made for thousands of years. His cousin dropped him off on the Mexico side of the San Miguel border gate, and he could see the community van of the Tohono O’odham Nation waiting for him just beyond.
But when Estevan handed over his tribal card for identification, as he had done for years, to the stationed Border Patrol agent, he was accused of carrying a fraudulent ID, denied entry to Arizona and sent back to Mexico.
Tohono O’odham aboriginal land, in what is now southern Arizona, historically extended 175 miles into Mexico, before being sliced off—without the tribe’s consent—by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexico side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, go to school, visit a doctor or, like Estevan, a traditional dancer, perform ceremonial duties.
But incidents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) aggression toward members of the Tohono O’odham Nation have become increasingly frequent since 9/11, as Border Patrol has doubled in size and further militarized its border enforcement. In 2007 and 2008, the United States built vehicle barriers on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, and restricted crossings.
The Tohono O’odham’s struggles with Border Patrol received little attention, however, until President Donald Trump took office and pushed forward his vision for a wall along the border. Verlon Jose, Tohono O’odham vice chairman, announced in 2016 that the wall would be built “over my dead body,” a quote that went viral.
What the border wall debate has obscured, however, is the existing 650 miles of walls and barriers on the U.S. international divide with Mexico, including the 62 miles of border that run through the Tohono O’odham Nation. An increasingly significant part of that wall is “virtual,” a network of surveillance cameras, sensors and radar systems that let Border Patrol agents from California to Texas monitor the remote desert stretches where border crossers have been deliberately pushed—a strategy that has led to thousands of migrant deaths in the dangerous desert terrain. The virtual wall expands away from the international boundary, deep into the interior of the country.
As Trump fights Congress and the courts to get $5 billion in “emergency funding” for a border wall, Border Patrol is already tapping into existing funds to expand both physical and virtual walls. While new border barrier construction on the Tohono O’odham Nation remains in limbo, new surveillance infrastructure is moving onto the reservation.
On March 22, the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council passed a resolution allowing CBP to contract the Israeli company Elbit Systems to build 10 integrated fixed towers, or IFTs, on the Nation’s land, surveillance infrastructure that many on the reservation see as a high-tech occupation.
The IFTs, says Amy Juan, Tohono O’odham member and Tucson office manager at the International Indian Treaty Council, will make the Nation “the most militarized community in the United States of America.”
Amy Juan and Nellie Jo David, members of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network (TOHRN), joined a delegation to the West Bank in October 2017 convened by the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall. It was a relief, Juan says, to talk “with people who understand our fears … who are dealing with militarization and technology.”
Juan and David told a group of women in the Palestinian community about the planned IFTs, and they responded unequivocally: “Tell them no. Don’t let them build them.”
The group was very familiar with these particular towers. Elbit Systems pioneered the towers in the West Bank. “They said that the IFTs were first tested on them and used against them,” says David. Community members described the constant buzzing sounds and the sense of being constantly watched.
These IFTs are part of a broader surveillance apparatus that zigzags for hundreds of miles through the West Bank and includes motion sensor systems, cameras, radar, aerial surveillance and observation posts. In distant control rooms, soldiers monitor the feeds. The principal architect, former Israeli Col. Danny Tirza, explained in 2016, “It’s not enough to construct a wall. You have to construct all the system around it.”
That is happening now in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
The massive post-9/11 bolstering of border enforcement dramatically changed life on the Tohono O’odham Nation. At a UN hearing in January on the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of borders, immigration and displacement, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Edward Manuel testified that when he came back to the Nation in 2009 after six years living off-reservation, it had become “a military state.”
Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, giving it access to the entirety of the reservation. Drones fly overhead, and motion sensors track foot traffic. Vehicle barriers and surveillance cameras and trucks appeared near burial grounds and on hilltops amid ancient saguaro forests, which are sacred to the Tohono O’odham.
“Imagine a bulldozer parking on your family graveyard, turning up bones,” then-Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris Jr. testified to Congress in 2008. “This is our reality.”
Around 2007, CBP began installing interior checkpoints that monitored every exit from the reservation—not just on the U.S.-Mexico border, but toward Tucson and Phoenix.
“As a person who once could move freely on our land, this was very new,” Amy Juan says. “We have no choice but to go through the armed agents, dogs and cameras. We are put through the traumatic experience every day just to go to work, movies, grocery shopping, to take your children to school.”
Juan calls this “checkpoint trauma.” The most severe impact is on children, she says, recalling one case in which two kids “wet themselves” approaching a checkpoint. Previously the children had been forcefully pulled out of a car by Border Patrol agents during a secondary inspection.
Pulling people out of their vehicles is one in a long list of abuses alleged against the Border Patrol agents on the Tohono O’odham Nation, including tailing cars, pepper spraying people and hitting them with batons. Closer to the border, people have complained about agents entering their homes without a warrant.
In March 2014, a Border Patrol agent shot and injured two Tohono O’odham men after their truck sideswiped his vehicle. (The driver said he was swerving to avoid a bush and misjudged; Border Patrol charged him with assault with a deadly weapon.) In 2002, a Border Patrol agent ran over and killed a Tohono O’odham teenager.
Between checkpoints and surveillance, there is a feeling of being “watched all the time,” Tohono O’odham member Joseph Flores told Tucson television station KVOA.
“I’ve gotten flat tires, then when I come to the checkpoint the agents made comments about me having a flat earlier in the day,” says Joshua Garcia, a member of TOHRN. “I felt like they were trying to intimidate me.”
An anonymous respondent to TOHRN’s O’odham Border Patrol Story Project said, “One time a BP told me, ‘We own the night,’ meaning that they have so much surveillance cameras and equipment on the rez, they can see everything we do all the time.”
Undocumented migrants are the ostensible targets, but agents have long indicated that Tohono O’odham are also in the crosshairs. One Tohono O’odham youth (who wishes to remain anonymous because of fears of reprisal) says that when they complained to a Border Patrol agent in February about a camera near their house, the agent responded, “It’s your own people that are smuggling, so you really need to ask yourself what is going on in that area for a camera to be set up in the first place.” That perception is common. Geographer Kenneth Madsen quotes an agent who believed as many as 80% to 90% of residents were involved in drug or human smuggling. Madsen believes the numbers could only be that high if agents were counting humanitarian acts, such as giving water to thirsty border-crossers.
Elder and former tribal councilman David Garcia acknowledges some “smuggling that involves tribal members.” As Tohono O’odham member Jay Juan told ABC News, there is “the enticement of easy money” in a place with a poverty rate over 40%.
Nation Vice Chairman Verlon Jose also told ABC, “Maybe there are some of our members who may get tangled up in this web. … But the issues of border security are created by the drugs … intended for your citizen[s’] towns across America.”
Estevan knew the agent who turned him back at the border—it was the same agent who had accused him of smuggling drugs years prior and who had ransacked his car in the search, finding nothing and leaving Estevan to do the repairs. A few days after being turned away, Estevan tried again to get home, crossing into the United States at a place known as the Vamori Wash—one of the planned locations for an IFT. He got a ride north from a friend (the kind of favor that Border Patrol might consider human smuggling). Eleven miles from the border on the crumbling Route 19, the same agent flashed his lights and pulled them over. According to Estevan, the agent yanked him out of the car, saying, “I told you that you were not supposed to come here,” and handcuffed him.
Estevan was transported to a short-term detention cell at Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, where he was stripped of everything “except my T-shirt and pants,” he says. The holding cell was frigid, and Border Patrol issued him what he describes as a “paper blanket.” Estevan contracted bronchitis as he was shuffled around for days, having his biometrics and picture taken for facial recognition—Border Patrol’s standard practice for updating its database.
At one point, Estevan faced a judge and attempted to talk to a lawyer. But because he was not supplied a Tohono O’odham interpreter, he had only a vague idea of what was going on. Later, Estevan was taken 74 miles north to a detention center in Florence, Ariz., where the private company CoreCivic holds many of the people arrested by Border Patrol. Estevan was formally deported and banished from the United States. He was dropped off in the late afternoon in Nogales, Mexico.
Estevan is far from the only Tohono O’odham from Mexico to say they have been deported, although there has not been an official count. The Supreme Council of the O’odham of Mexico—which represents the Tohono O’odham who live on the Mexican side of the border—made an official complaint to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s government in May 2018, saying the Nation was “allowing the deportation of our people from our own lands.”
Some members of the Nation, such as Ofelia Rivas, of the Gu-Vo district, have long contended that the Legislative Council is too cozy with Border Patrol. Rivas said in a 2006 interview that the Nation “has allowed the federal government to control the northern territory [in the U.S.] and allows human rights violations to occur.” The Nation has received grants from the federal government for its police department through a program known as Operation Stonegarden. Over the years, the Legislative Council has voted to allow a checkpoint, surveillance tech and two Border Patrol substations (one a Forward Operating Base) on the reservation.
These tensions resurfaced again around the IFTs.
***
In 2006, Border Patrol began to use southern Arizona as a testing ground for its “virtual wall.” The agency awarded the Boeing Company a contract for a technology plan known as SBInet, which would build 80-foot surveillance towers in the Arizona desert.
When Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano cancelled the plan in 2011, complaining about cost, delays and ineffectiveness, CBP launched a new project, the 2011 Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan. As part of it, Elbit Systems won a $145 million contract to construct 53 IFTs in 2014. As CBP’s Chief Acquisition Officer Mark Borkowski explained in 2017 at the San Antonio Border Security Expo, CBP sought technology that “already existed” elsewhere. Elbit, with its towers in the West Bank, fit the bill.
The IFTs take the all-seeing eye of Border Patrol to a whole new level. Jacob Stukenberg, a Border Patrol public information officer, tells In These Times they are “far superior than anything else we’ve had before,” adding that “one agent can surveil an area that it might take 100 agents on foot to surveil.”
The IFT system has high-definition cameras with night vision and a 7.5-mile radius, along with thermal sensors and a 360-degree ground-sweeping radar. The data feeds into command centers where agents are alerted if any of thousands of motion sensors are tripped. In an interview in May with the Los Angeles Times, Border Patrol tribal liaison Rafael Castillo compared IFTs to “turning on a light in a dark room.”
As with other monitoring, the towers—some as tall as 140 feet and placed very visibly on the tops of hills—have already driven migrants into more desolate and deadly places, according to a January paper in the Journal of Borderlands Studies. The first IFT went up in January 2015, just outside of Nogales, Ariz. By 2017, according to Borkowski, nearly all the towers had been built or were about to be built around Nogales, Tucson, Douglas, Sonoita and Ajo. The holdout was the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Between 2015 and 2018, Joshua Garcia of TOHRN gave more than 30 presentations around the Nation raising the negatives of the IFTs, including federal government encroachment on their lands, the loss of control over local roads, the potential health consequences and racism in border policing. “I didn’t expect people necessarily to agree with me,” Garcia says, “but I was surprised at how much the presentations resonated.”
Garcia joined other tribal and community members and Sierra Club Borderlands in contesting CBP’s 2016 draft environmental assessment—required for construction to begin—which claimed the IFTs would have “no significant impact” on Tohono O’odham land. Garcia listed the sites that new roads would threaten, like a saguaro fruit-harvesting camp and his own family’s cemetery.
The Sierra Club argued the assessment had failed to properly look at the impacts on endangered species, such as the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl and the lesser longnosed bat, and hadn’t adequately studied how electro-magnetic radiation from the towers might affect people, birds and other wildlife. CBP agreed that more study was needed of the “avian brain,” but issued its final report in March 2017: no significant impact.
In July 2017, the Gu-Vo district passed a resolution in opposition to the IFTs. “Having the land remain open, undeveloped and home to food production and wildlife, and carbon sequestration with natural water storage is crucial to the community,” the statement read.
At the March 22 Legislative Council meeting, Garcia, the tribal elder (and a close relative of Estevan), implored the Council not to approve the IFTs. He looked to Councilman Edward Manuel, who had two months earlier described the Border Patrol presence on the Nation as a “military state,” and said, “Veto it, if it passes.”
The resolution passed, without veto, although with a number of stipulations, including compensation for leased land.
Nation Vice Chairman Jose told the Los Angeles Times that the vote was intended to be a compromise to dissuade the federal government from building the wall. The Nation is “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,” Jose said.
A Border Patrol spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times, however, that there are no plans to reduce agents, and that the IFTs do not eliminate the need for a wall.
***
Garcia and other resisters are up against an enormous system. Trump’s plan has never been just about a border wall: The administration wants to fortify a massive surveillance apparatus built over multiple presidencies. Asked in February what he thought about the focus on the wall, Border Patrol’s Stukenberg said it was just one component of border infrastructure. Three things are required—fence, technology and personnel, he said, to build a “very solid system.”
The endeavor is certainly very profitable. Boeing received more than $1 billion for the cancelled SBInet technology plan. For the 49 mobile surveillance trucks now patrolling the border, CBP awarded contracts to the U.S.-based private companies FLIR Systems and Telephonics. Another contract went to General Dynamics to upgrade CBP’s Remote Video Surveillance Systems, composed of towers and monitoring systems. As of 2017, 71 such towers had been deployed in desolate areas of southern Arizona, including one on the Tohono O’odham Nation. Other major companies that have received CBP contracts include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and KBR (a former Halliburton subsidiary).
These companies wield tremendous lobbying power in Washington. In 2018, General Dynamics spent more than $12 million on lobbying and gave $143,000 in campaign contributions to members of the House Homeland Security Committee. To compare, the Tohono O’odham Nation spent $230,000 on lobbying and $6,900 on campaign contributions to the committee members in 2018.
Meanwhile, at the UN hearing in January, Serena Padilla, of the nearby Akimel O’odham Nation, described an incident in which Border Patrol agents held a group of youth at gunpoint. She ended her testimony: “As a woman who is 65 years old with four children, 15 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren—I’ll be damned if I won’t go down fighting for my future great-great-grandchildren.”
▻http://inthesetimes.com/article/21903/us-mexico-border-surveillance-tohono-oodham-nation-border-patrol
Emerging land use practices rapidly increase soil organic matter : Nature Communications
▻http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7995
http://www.nature.com/article-assets/npg/ncomms/2015/150430/ncomms7995/images/m685/ncomms7995-f1.jpg 
The loss of organic matter from agricultural lands constrains our ability to sustainably feed a growing population and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Addressing these challenges requires land use activities that accumulate soil carbon (C) while contributing to food production. In a region of extensive soil degradation in the southeastern United States, we evaluated soil C accumulation for 3 years across a 7-year chronosequence of three farms converted to management-intensive grazing. Here we show that these farms accumulated C at 8.0 Mg ha−1 yr−1, increasing cation exchange and water holding capacity by 95% and 34%, respectively. Thus, within a decade of management-intensive grazing practices soil C levels returned to those of native forest soils, and likely decreased fertilizer and irrigation demands. Emerging land uses, such as management-intensive grazing, may offer a rare win–win strategy combining profitable food production with rapid improvement of soil quality and short-term climate mitigation through soil C-accumulation.
#sol #carbone #stratégie #pâturage #production_alimentaire #climat #CO2
That Boom You Hear Is Ukraine’s Agriculture - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-14/that-boom-you-hear-is-ukraine-s-agriculture
Ukraine sold $7.6 billion of bulk farm commodities worldwide in 2015, quintupling its revenue from a decade earlier and topping Russia, its closest rival on world markets. By the mid-2020s, “Ukraine will be No. 3, after the U.S. and Brazil,” in food production worldwide, says Martin Schuldt, the top representative in Ukraine for Cargill, the world’s largest grain trader. The company, headquartered in Minnetonka, Minn., saw its sunflower-seed processing plant in the Donetsk region overrun by separatists in 2014; it still can’t regain access to the facility. Nonetheless, the company is investing $100 million in a new grain terminal in Ukraine. Bunge, the world’s biggest soy processor, opened a port this year at a ceremony with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko—another vote of confidence in the country.
Avec son graphisme qui vaut son pesant de khakhavitch !
Climate impact on crops will hit poorest
▻http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=6e13c74c17ec527c4be72d64f&id=2cadc42974&e=08052803c8
Climate impact on crops
will hit poorest
Global food production may need to rise by more than 100 per cent to deal with climate change’s effects on crops in the most vulnerable regions.
By Tim Radford
LONDON, 27 September, 2016 – More than half of all the world’s maize crops and around a third of all wheat and rice will be grown in regions vulnerable to climate change in the next 50 to 100 years, according to new research.
At the same time, the world’s population will grow to 9 billion, and global food production will need to rise by from 60% to 110% by 2050 to keep up with demand.
Such changes will inevitably hit the poorest nations hardest, and will put at hazard the planet’s remaining wilderness areas and the surviving wild plants and animals that keep ecosystems stable.
The Harsh, Hidden Lessons of Tree School - Issue 40: Learning
▻http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-harsh-hidden-lessons-of-tree-school
Thirst is harder for trees to endure than hunger, because they can satisfy their hunger whenever they want. Like a baker who always has enough bread, a tree can satisfy a rumbling stomach right away using photosynthesis. But even the best baker cannot bake without water, and the same goes for a tree: Without moisture, food production stops. A mature beech tree can send more than 130 gallons of water a day coursing through its branches and leaves, and this is what it does as long as it can draw enough water up from below. However, the moisture in the soil would soon run out if the tree were to do that every day in summer. In the warmer seasons, it doesn’t rain nearly enough to replenish water levels in the desiccated soil. Therefore, the tree stockpiles water in winter.Raimund Linke In (...)
The global farmland grab in 2016: how big, how bad?
▻https://www.grain.org/fr/article/entries/5492-the-global-farmland-grab-in-2016-how-big-how-bad
Eight years later, we went back to look at the data—the myriad reports of land grabbing for food production that we have been following and assessing. Over the past several years, GRAIN staff and allies in different regions have been tracking media and other information sources on a daily basis and posting reports on land grab developments to the open-publishing platform farmlandgrab.org. We used this website as the basis for constructing this dataset, which holds 491 land deals covering over 30 million hectares spanning 78 countries.[2] This new research shows that, while some deals have fallen by the wayside, the global farmland grab is far from over. Rather, it is in many ways deepening, expanding to new frontiers and intensifying conflict around the world. We hope this updated dataset will be useful tool for movements, communities, researchers and activists fighting against land grabbing and defending community-based food systems.
Eight years later: overall assessment
The big picture view that we draw from this exercise is disturbing. First of all, the emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse. While most countries are not currently experiencing the extreme price hikes in basic foodstuffs that triggered riots from Haiti to Egypt back in 2008, prices remain stubbornly high and access to food is a daily struggle for most people.[3] Today, that situation is compounded by the mounting impacts of climate change. Harvest losses due to extreme weather have become so acute in places like the southern Philippines that farmers are in the streets begging for food and getting killed for it.[4] We now have even more evidence that climate change is caused not just by burning coal and oil for transport and energy, but by the industrial food system itself and the corporate quest for profits that drives its expansion. Indeed, climate change and land grabs are inextricably linked.
The Worm Is Turning (2015)
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-worm-is-turning-2015
THE WORM IS TURNING tells the story of how corporate agribusiness is taking over the world’s food production in the name of ’efficiency’ and ’feeding a starving world’ - while actually destroying...
Climate change is not gender-neutral | UNDP
▻http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/blog/2015/11/17/Climate-change-is-not-gender-neutral.html
It is well established that the poor are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and that women—who account for the majority of the world’s poor—are disproportionately impacted.
Why is this fact so important? And what are we doing to address it?
Women farmers account for 45 to 80 percent of all food production in developing countries. This means that any changes in climate—such as droughts and floods—affect their livelihoods, incomes and food security more than they do men.
Women also suffer from discrimination, limiting their rights, their access to land and their access to services. Such discrimination has important implications during the aftermath of weather-related emergencies, as women are usually the last to receive services like credit and technical support.
Increasing Food Production … and then wasting it?!
March 10, 2016
By: Anne Saab, Assistant Professor of International Law, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies- Geneva, Switzerland
▻http://www.arabspatial.org/blog//blog/2016/03/10/increasing-food-production-%E2%80%A6-and-then-wasting-it
While the proposed solutions have concentrated mostly on increasing food production, Arab countries should make more serious work of combating food waste and encouraging more sustainable consumption.
[...]
Related to sustainable consumption is food waste. National Geographic in its March 2016 issue has a feature on food waste, and data reveals that in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia less than half of the food that is produced is actually consumed. Over half of food production is lost in the production process or wasted in post-production. Reducing food waste is a key part of sustainable consumption (and production). Although food waste does not always feature very prominently in climate change discussions, it must feature much more highly on the food security agenda. There is little sense in investing immense efforts on increasing production, while continuing to waste more than half of what is produced.
Haiti’s Fraudulent Presidential Frontrunner Seizes Land for His Own Banana Republic
▻http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/25695-haitis-fraudulent-presidential-frontrunner-seizes-land-for-his-o
The only man running in Haiti’s fraudulent presidential election run-offson January 24, 2016, Jovenel Moïse, dispossessed as many as 800 peasants - who were legally farming - and destroyed houses and crops two years ago, say leaders of farmers’ associations in the Trou-du-Nord area. Farmers remain homeless and out of work. The land grabbed by the company Moïse founded, Agritrans, now hosts a private banana plantation.
To grow bananas for export in a hungry nation, Agritrans received at least $6 million in state loans, and possibly much more. Agritrans seized a 1,000-hectare (2,371-acre) tract from farmers, bulldozed their houses and fields, used bribes to buy local support, distorted claims of its benefit to local residents, and created a phantom organization to legitimate itself.
Should he become president, the company Moïse created would likely be a bellwether of loss of family livelihood and domestic food production.
Massive road and rail projects could be Africa’s greatest environmental challenge
▻https://theconversation.com/massive-road-and-rail-projects-could-be-africas-greatest-environmen
If completed in their entirety, the corridors will total over 53,000 kilometres in length, crisscrossing the African continent. Some individual corridors are over 4,000 kilometres long.
Will these corridors generate key social and economic benefits, or will they cause great environmental harm? To address this question, we looked at three factors, focusing on a 50-kilometre-wide band laid over the top of each corridor.
First, we assessed the “natural values” of each corridor, by combining data on its biodiversity, endangered species, critical habitats for wildlife, and the carbon storage and climate-regulating benefits of its native vegetation.
Second, we mapped human populations near each corridor, using satellite data to detect nightlights from human settlements (to avoid lands that were simply being burned, we included only places with “persistent” nightlights). We then combined the natural-value and population data to generate a conservation-value score for each corridor, reasoning that sparsely populated areas with high natural values have the greatest overall conservation value.
Finally, we estimated the potential for new roads or railroads to increase food production. Areas that scored highly had soils and climates suitable for farming but large yield gaps, were within several hours’ drive of a city or port, and were projected to see large future increases in food demand.
Dam on Ethiopia’s Omo River Causing Hunger and Conflict | National Geographic (blogs)
▻http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/02/dam-on-ethiopias-omo-river-causing-hunger-and-conflict
In the lower Omo River Valley of southern Ethiopia, a spreading humanitarian emergency that threatens to spawn conflicts in the region is largely being met with silence from both the Ethiopian government and the international community.
The filling of the reservoir behind Gibe III Dam on the Omo River is holding back the flows needed by some 200,000 indigenous people in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya to sustain their food production and livelihoods.
“People are starving and dying,” according to a trusted source who wished to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions from speaking out. “They need international support.”
World will pass crucial 2C global warming limit, experts warn | Environment | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/10/climate-2c-global-warming-target-fail
Pledges by nations to cut carbon emissions will fall far short of those needed to prevent global temperatures rising by more than the crucial 2C by the end of the century. This is the stark conclusion of climate experts who have analysed submissions in the runup to the Paris climate talks later this year.
A rise of 2C is considered the most the Earth could tolerate without risking catastrophic changes to food production, sea levels, fishing, wildlife, deserts and water reserves. Even if rises are pegged at 2C, scientists say this will still destroy most coral reefs and glaciers and melt significant parts of the Greenland ice cap, bringing major rises in sea levels.