world care
La Via Campesina in the world remains strong and still today most of the world's population is rural and we are precisely those caregivers vilified in the world, who feed the rest of humanity.
sucumbiéramos indigenous If we listen carefully maize ancient voice, the future of humanity would be threatened.
There are groups that do not ask anyone's permission to be, by the mere fact of having a culture which we eat as a result of community work, without relying on the outside almost to nothing. This allows us to take care of our community, our land, forest, water, material and spiritual beings, our knowledge of biodiversity and traditional and contemporary are all a way to face life. The life force that exists between the corn (which is also a community) and the human community, is a tireless social and political heart, so after 10 thousand years that our seeds are still alive, now grow corn with our own seeds is a political issue.
The war against the peasants.
Stripped of vast expanses of our ancestral lands of indigenous peoples continue growing maize on the slopes and terraces, sometimes in very difficult conditions. Corn has withstood everything.
Large companies and governments decided that those who sow corn with so many native-knowledge that give life, we had to leave the field because we produced only for the community without going to the market. They want people who planted the city we go to factories or large agricultural companies to work semi enslaved, so you can stay our territory and all the riches that are there.
Since the fifties, governments and businesses, accomplices, engaged farmers to buy seeds called hybrid performed better at first but then only with much fertilizer and industrial pesticides just very little. The soils are eroded and became dependent on these drugs, which many buy each year so that the land surrender.
Today, farmers are less likely to survive are the ones who changed their seed for hybrid and they got to pay every year for lumps of these pesticides, eroded soils. Began to be very difficult to live the corn and emptied many people lost their communities and to be older, to be farmers. With the Green Revolution technologies were spurned the great wisdom behind the landraces were imposed forms of cultivation and use highly matched, they destroyed many ways that communities had to maintain, improve and share seeds.
The privatization of land speculation reopened land, invasions and expropriation, and ushered in the mega-projects that threaten to any rural community whose livelihood is agriculture. Be extreme and increasing social exclusion in the field. It led to the expulsion of labor to cities or fields of laborers, the emptying of the territories, encouraged also by the formal school, they instilled in children and young people who study serves to receive a salary, to stop being peasants and leave. These ideas pit ruin the relationship with the land and the pride of producing the food itself.
GM contamination is the most alarming sign because it is intentional. Disfigure GM maize variety depleting cared for centuries, its richness and meaning. Promote total dependence of industry, agriculture take away from any vital sense. But many maintain our ancient craft and we are in resistance. Perhaps the key is the detailed care peasants put in the subject, through a maze of knowledge that seem mysterious today.
1. only those directly involved in planting can do something. The solution to the problem of contamination of GM maize can only be solved in the long term, and we are the peasants and indigenous peoples who can achieve this, a community. There must be a prevention and natural healing characteristic of the ancient relationship between maize and humans, and in cases of deformed or seed corn that will seem strange to communities, can make a laboratory diagnosis. Rethinking
culture is collectively political force, economic, social and ecological, and relies on our being farmers planting it with the community itself, whose heart is the assembly.
2. Restoring confidence in the seed we sow. Maize detect harmful to the wisdom of old, leaving the hybrids (and other foreign seeds) back to the trusted channel for exchange and seed care. As a critical time, not enough to do what we've always done. We must reflect and sharpen the focus on our corn, physically, spiritually, what is happening in their environment, to identify and isolate GM (break of Tang unreliable plant is one of the many precautions.) We need to know what seed we are planting, be debugged each cycle our seed, so we will discard contaminated corn.
3. The challenge is to remember. Understand what they were doing to preserve the old life. Promote advocacy, recognition and sharing of our traditional techniques of cultivation (agronomic, environmental, medical and others) including new knowledge of crop organic, agro-ecology, permaculture and other reliable techniques. Join traditional and alternative agriculture gives us a powerful tool if further strengthen diversity on farms and backyard farming.
4. To defend is to continue cultivating corn. The greatest threat to native maize is already grown recently. We must diversify varieties, planting all possible in each cycle, because that gives guarantees against changes in weather, heat and humidity. It is important to plant corn early and latecomers. If diversified varieties, also have to diversify crops, and handle the ages of pollen, with that decrease the possibility of unreliable seed from getting to the property.
5. is central to maintain our identity as peoples. The pass defense of maize to restore and strengthen our sacred ceremonies, custom, traditions and rituals of care and permission as usual. Today there is all this wealth because each town had maintained its tradition, because there was respect for history and the willingness of each community and family, a respect for the sacred. If we keep all this wealth we have to respect what is sacred and throughout our history.
6. have to keep the seed and soil. Someone who loses the seed is much more likely to have to migrate that someone still has it. Keep the seed means having good seed for oneself, the community, for the land to which one has access. A seed that meets the needs and tastes of each village. If tastes are standardized or try to match the needs, you lose the quality of seeds: its diversity.
Today there is an attack on biodiversity. The people that diversity is not dependent. Are changing laws to force peasants and indigenous people to become dependent. To preserve the diversity we have to ask how to preserve life, which is what the law allows and what we need, with permission or without permission of the law. We must refuse to laws that criminalize our savings and our exchange of trust millennium seed.
7. Lost collective knowledge. The corn can never be in the hands of a group, no matter how chosen or is committed. It is impossible for one person, company or state institution that is able to create seeds that are good for everyone.
diversity and seed quality are there thousands and thousands of farmers producing it. No seeds but only exchange knowledge exchange. The seeds may be different because we all know different things. To have diverse seed must have a range of fields. But we know from bits, and only among many is a great find. The wealth of variety never ends. Each person, family or community by passing a variety you add or change something. Do not forget ever we all know. When we accept that someone as ignorant question, we do not know, we do not have ideas, we are accepting that knowledge is lost over the seeds.
8. Lost soils. Not only in terms of plot, but in microregions or larger regions. We should abandon the chemicals and turn many of the ancient knowledge to fertilize, and the systems controlling pests without pesticides or herbicides.
For the peoples of maize in Mexico, the Green Revolution was when he became addicted to crops and land to a drug that is increasingly needed more and more and used less and less. Not only are we faced with GM contamination, but the pollution from chemicals, the super weeds and pest resistance that have upset the balance within the fields. The earth is poisoned, but also the water and the fish have been lost and have been poisoned. In the corn also must be allowed to eat food for the animals that may become pests. They also eat and to survive, a community-milpa also included so you can not eat or apparently clogged or is not useful in principle. It is very important to live with diversity of animals.
also have to curb soil erosion. Strengthening water harvesting and ground to prevent subsidence and landslides. We can not think only about the plot, has to be community regional. Territorial. Feed the soil, planting rows of trees, making stone seals on the slopes of the hills to gather the earth that goes with the rains, we can only do so in community.
9. Crop sovereign. Instead of talking about consumption, let's sovereign crops. It is essential to try to get out as much as possible, the money economy. Produce to sell and buy to eat make us lose food sovereignty and labor of the people of corn. A people who buy seed and buying food is a people that can send itself.
We should be proud to grow corn to eat the family, community, strengthening the knowledge of the largest and comprehensive new techniques that are consistent with and complement this knowledge.
As there are no subsidies or price supports building or that underpin the rural economy is vital coupled subsidies and price supports autonomous own (regional), perhaps calling for migrants and their organizations. Dare to stop spending on manufactured goods which are not indispensable. Think how little ones return to markets, ways of barter, local exchanges, to find a manageable way of life, respect for the whole. It is therefore important that all communities that produce is consumed, so that the community understands that we can produce our own food.
10. GM contamination is intentional. A purpose. And the government claims that as I was contaminated, it is time to allow the planting of GM crops. Or you can propose the extermination of native varieties "contaminated" in a speech to eliminate contamination of maize. But do not trust the government. We can not allow outside the community (laboratories, armed forces, businesses, government programs) come to our communities saying that they will help.
11. Prevent entry of seeds from which we do not know their history. Close our borders and regional national seed out, are hybrids or feed industries, or government stores. Stop buy and look for the exchange and its own marketing where possible. Spread and perform a sabotage of food aid packages for those who know its origins or intentions of those who we want them to grant. We demand a halt to agricultural imports.
12. We reject the unjust laws biosafety and intellectual property genetic access, and we demand to maintain the moratorium on planting transgenic maize building partnerships to strengthen it. Also deny certification programs and individualization land. Are a strategy to destroy the maize and its peoples. so we must defend our territory and the community character, communal, indefeasible, inalienable from our lands.
13. autonomy is a priority to strengthen the community organization. The struggle to defend the corn goes to the fight for territory and self-government. When the assembly is the highest authority, we encourage agricultural and environmental characteristics tactics. In our statutes and regulations communal ejido may be prohibited planting of GM crops, and establishing a de facto moratorium decreed by the indigenous peoples and peasants around consumption, planting corn and racking GM. It is essential to achieve the integrity of indigenous lands through a balance that has kept him as a territory.
Corn and empower our corn
Defender (the field where it was venerated sacred, ancestral knowledge that made it possible and the margin of autonomy that gives plant it for their own consumption) allows us to strengthen the struggle for our collective rights, community and our government defend our story as water, forest, land and our own careful and welfare projects outside aid. Only corn
own native (not the distorted version transgenic) seed to community depending eat as little as possible, you can experience the fields of us: the collective, self-righteousness, self-government, assembly, in a life against the planetary systems.
One purpose of GM is to make all farmers have to buy seeds every year, and to ensure that companies are devising a variety that is harvested only once and its seeds are sterile, known as the Terminator. If Terminator contaminate any other variety, sterile back, and mean total dependency to the designers and companies producing seeds, which are patenting more and more varieties.
is urgent then we start a process of reflection that gives us the horizon of how we attack the planners and the world powers, agribusiness and governments. From the cornfields
see the world. We must assert what we mean farmers in a globalized world that wants to become even agriculture industry. Corn and other crops rulers are the heart of the community resistance against capitalism and its mega-projects. Keep our loving relationship with corn loophole allows us enough not to ask anyone's permission to be driving a real resistance, political, social, economic, knowledge, dignity and justice. We allows for self-government with the cargo system as a service, what the Zapatistas call "obeying." Allows the loophole needed to rebuild our own way. It makes us understand the web of relationships that enable the existence of this food-craft-relationship is sacred.
wixárika The people of the mountains of Jalisco, Mexico, puts it this way:
- OK: to defend the corn ...
- To defend the land we have to fix ...
- So you have to stop using chemicals that have worn. Back to planting the old fashioned way.
- But then we find that there is no landslides or erosion ...
- To this has to rebalance the water ...
- that is to care for forests, pa 'to stop erosion, bring rain, cool the area with good air ...
- But for that we must defend our territory and take action in pursuit of our rights to land and people ...
- then we must have a real community organization, where those who are representatives, truly obey the mandate of the community.
- I mean strengthening the role of community assemblies, not just community, bringing together traditional authorities and land, as governments always tried to separate them.
- Then we have to have corn, so that who take charge are not in need of work, but who still anchored to the ground, as farmers in the same circumstances as the rest of the commoners.
Then there is a kind of magic circle: a proposal for completeness where nothing can be unlinked. This is the integral reconstitution of communities, community organization. It is the cultivation of maize as the heart of a resistance and the possibility of autonomy, making full use of its territory at all levels: from the geographical to the holy, the wealth of human relationships and everything, because everything is alive . Conclusions
Defender corn is to defend life and peasant-indigenous worldview. And vice versa. In this way, the people of the cities has a role that is just beginning to recognize . This process of resistance to agribusiness and global planning entities and their directors are embodied in government, reinforcing the vision ends with a horizon that people just premiered a few years ago. The horizon appears black, as corn and many other strategic crops are at risk, and as such the viability of rural areas but also cities. If people in big cities with rural ties his thoughts and his sharp criticism, begin to understand the importance plant their own food . In the field, but inescapably in the cities, but now we all recognize as urgent. Meanwhile, despite the violence and criminalization, despite all the attacks on indigenous peoples and peasants, hope and corn are still alive.
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