January 2001

LAND, DEBT, SEEDS OF WRATH...

THE NEW PEASANTS’ REVOLT The arseniclaced waters of Bangladesh

Will Americans ever opt for direct elections?

White fortresses in cyberspace

Canada:$3.95 Cdn,United Kingdom:£2.5,USA:$4.25

On the way towards a freer and safer information society

The International Dimensions of Cyberspace Law Comprising ■

comprehensive studies of little-explored questions arising in cyberspace and various law initiatives taken in selected countries and international organizations, this book describes how pertinent international ethical values and legal principles are being applied in this field.

■ Interdisciplinary

Theoretical and practical

23.5 x 15.5 cm 241 pp. ISBN 92-3-103752-8 180 FF / 27.44

■ Written by leading

academics and professionals who are the principal actors in cyberspace all over the world

UNESC O

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C O N T E N T S JANUARY 2001

54th year Published monthly in 27 languages and in Braille by the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization. 31,rue François Bonvin,75732 Paris Cedex 15 France Fax:(33) (0) 1.45.68.57.45 - (33) (0) 1.45.68.57.47 e-mail:[email protected] Internet:http://www.unesco.org/courier

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PEOPLE AND PLACES 4 The tar, the fracture and the bond Photos by André Lejarre, text by Kacha

Editorial staff (Paris) Editor in Chief: James Burnet English edition: Cynthia Guttman Spanish edition: Lucía Iglesias Kuntz French edition: Sophie Boukhari

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Ethirajan Anbarasan Michel Bessières Ivan Briscoe Asbel López Amy Otchet

PLANET 10 Who is to blame for Bangladesh’s arsenic poisoning? Fred Pearce

Translation Miguel Labarca Art and production unit: The Mouveur, Photoengraving: Annick Coueffé Illustrations: Ariane Bailey (Tel:(33) (0) 1.45.68.46.90) Documentation: José Banaag (Tel:(33) (0) 1.45.68.46.85) Liaison with non-Headquarters editions and press: Solange Belin (Tel:33 (0) 1.45.68.46.87)

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WORLD OF LEARNING 14 Disabled children: breaking down the divide Cynthia Guttman

Editorial Committee René Lefort (moderator), Jérome Bindé, Milagros del Corral, Alcino Da Costa, Babacar Fall, Sue Williams

Focus

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Working the fields in Thailand. © Yann Arthus-Bertrand/ “La Terre vue du Ciel”/ UNESCO, Paris

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Land, debt, seeds of wrath… The New Peasants’ Revolt Industrial agriculture is built upon single crops, intensive use of fertilizers and concentrated land ownership. Across the world, farmers are rebelling against the forces that are chasing them from their land, destroying the environment and poisoning our food. From the landless workers’ movement in Brazil to organic farmers in Bangladesh and livestock breeders in France, their initiatives go well beyond agricultural techniques. By promoting family-based farming, they are defending a whole new set of environmental and social relations.

Detailed table of contents on page 16.

ETHICS 38 Will the College crumble? Amy Otchet

CULTURE 41 Chugging along on Europe’s literary express Leo Tuor

MEDIA 44 White fortresses in cyberspace Les Back

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TALKING TO… 47 Eduardo Galeano: the open veins of McWorld

Signed articles express the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of UNESCO or those of the editors of the UNESCO Courier. Photo captions and headlines are written by the UNESCO Courier staff. The boundaries on maps do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by UNESCO or the United Nations of the countries and territories concerned. January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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The rice harvest.

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The tar, the fracture and the bond PHOTOS BY ANDRÉ LEJARRE,TEXT BY KACHA André Lejarre is a French photographer, Kacha is a retired senior civil servant from Senegal.

The development of irrigated areas along the Senegal river has changed the nature of both the town of Ndioum and its people

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returned to Ndioum early one morning when a chill was carried into town by the harmattan, the wind of the Moors that raises a golden-yellow dust in the rising sun, shrouding houses, wheelbarrows and animals in the mist, and making silhouettes appear to emerge as if they were stepping out from behind a curtain. Even the tar seemed to be born with each step I took. The paved road now runs across Ndioum from one end to the other. But the “avenue,” as it is called, has stirred up many controversies… The thoroughfare has enabled motorists to drive across the Fouta region in any season. It has also brought large machines that have dug holes in the forest separating the great river from the diéry,the dry savannah.Their work has dried up the water’s ceaseless rise and fall that fertilized the land,making sure everybody had enough to eat, and set the pace for the season’s labours. And now the river opens out onto wide areas developed by Italians, broad stretches of treeless land where Sérères, Diolas and Wolofs dwell alongside the indigenous people—their cousins, the Torobés. It is a

A tomato plantation.

The paved road now runs across Ndioum from one end to the other. But the “avenue,” as it is called, has stirred up many controversies… January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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The tar, the fracture and the bond

Returning from the fields, along a branch of the Senegal River.

place where cultures and many peoples have mingled. Tar has turned Ndioum into a crossroads of commerce. Tradespeople from Mauritania and former military staff and civil servants have built all the shops, lined up next to each other like a row of boxes, jam-packed with all kinds of goods.The entrances are encumbered by wheelbarrows and the small stalls of vendors selling fritters who rush up to travellers when they stop their cars. I walked across the village looking for my neighbourhood. Everyone has brought their own style to this land.The regional hospital, the pride of Ndioum, the “semi-stories” with their wide colour strips of emigrants belonging to France, the cushy, gated villas of executives from Dakar that are as uncomfortable as they are ill-suited to the climate; the large mosque on the hill; the small farmers’ bank and its grain storehouse; the two service stations at the beginning and end of the avenue. The space between the avenue and the houses shrinks; the windows looking out onto the road are still shuttered when the shops begin to thrive.At the end of the month, the post office is always crowded

with parents picking up money orders sent by their children who have emigrated abroad. Where are the buildings made of stuccoed earth with their dark, cool inner verandahs that protected the occupants from the windblown ochre dust? Where are the large concessions surrounded by medium-high stockade fences through which you could catch glimpses of life’s dramas—the letter announcing a daughter’s engagement to an expatriate; the neighbour who brought back a disease from central Africa that is taking a terrible toll? But the tiny El Hadj Oumar Tal mosque is still standing, with its roof tiles from Marseilles, its palm trees and around it, the lush gardens of the former chief of police, which look like an oasis in this huge plain turned upside-down by construction work. Ndioum and the myth that followed the taming of the river captured the imaginations of only those who came from far away to answer the call of its endless spaces, criss-crossed by a grid of irrigation canals.The villagers received their plots, lost in

Where are the large concessions surrounded by medium-high stockade fences through which you could catch glimpses of life’s dramas? 6 The Unesco Courier - January 2001

the immensity of the big development projects, on which the women persist in digging furrows with their hoes, planting rice by hand, shunning modern paddies with a self-confident gesture. They, and the young people, are the ones who spurred on the changes. They are moving forward gradually, occupying the places left behind, the fields that are too hard to work, which belonged to the heads of households who have left for distant countries.The impatient young people, whether or not they have gone to school or have paying jobs, are bursting into the traditional hierarchical circles. They are in a strong position because they have banded together, challenging the old order, confiscating, taking action when the elders hesitate and endlessly drag out the negotiations. I greeted the nostalgic, retired old men conversing beneath a tree, hashing over their memories.They’re talking about their monthly trip to Dakar to pick up their pensions and see their grown children. Politics works its way into the conversation. “The government doesn’t give our children jobs, the schools no longer train them, and anybody can get away with anything. There’s a fine hospital, but I’d rather go to Dakar because here

At Salamata’s.

Balancing laundry, young girls return from the river.

January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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The tar, the fracture and the bond they send us students who change so often that we don’t have the time to get to know them.The Diola doctor from Kédougou was the best, but he left. They’ve developed 2,000 hectares and already had six harvests in two years.” “Nobody’s happy with these projects,” they say.“They give us bilharziasis, people go blind from planting seeds in the water under the blazing sun. The development company takes ninetenths of our harvests away from us to pay for the water, the pumps and the equipment.They come and tell us that in their airconditioned cars, while it’s 35° celcius in the shade.We would have cultivated millet and rice for more than a hundred years with the money they take away from us… There are no more fish in the river and the animals cannot graze any longer.Our daughters and nieces marry Wolofs, Diolas and Sérères,if not foreign Catholics.” I tried changing the subject and started talking about the local

elections.The last ones were hard-fought.The current mayor, an administrative and financial officer elected to the national assembly, is running against a teacher, the son of a great family of marabouts (Muslim holy men). Electricity has become expensive; water used to be free but now it must be paid for; the mayor is selfish. He built a town hall but lives in Dakar and never keeps his promises. But soon the 72 hours of Ndioum, a major annual cultural event, will be here, luring all the errant sons and daughters back home.The festival is three days of indescribable chaos,an exuberant celebration of Fouta’s culture with traditional wrestling matches, fantasias on horseback, ballah rock and its most accomplished ambassadors, Youssou N’Dour and Baba Maal. Tar has worked wonders here, if only by bonding Ndioum to the world. ■

A peanut oil pump stands in front of Adana Sabou’s store.

Electricity has become expensive; water used to be free but now it must be paid for; the mayor is selfish. He built a town hall but lives in Dakar and never keeps his promises 8 The Unesco Courier - January 2001

Sacks of rice piled up in one of Ndioum’s general stores.

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DEVELOPING THE SENEGAL RIVER The three countries past which the Senegal River flows—Mali, Mauritania and Senegal—began work to open the river up for trade at the start of the 1970s, leading to the inauguration of dams at Diama and Manantali in 1985 and 1987 respectively. Primary goals of the development project were to regulate the river flow to improve its accessibility to river traffic,supply urban centres with clean drinking water, stop saltwater reaching beyond the mouth of the river, and above all protect the region from its fickle climate by ensuring regular irrigation. The total irrigated area is due to reach 375,000 hectares, 190,000 of which will be in Senegal. Some 30,000 hectares in that country are already being irrigated. The scheme’s main funding bodies, including the European Union and various national development agencies, have so far lent over $500 million, while 60 percent of Senegal’s agricultural investment is thought to have been devoted to implementing the plan.Crop yields, however, remain low, at four tonnes per hectare of paddy field twice a year. The soil is getting saline. A lack of interest from the state, neoliberal policies,the devaluation of the African franc, rising prices for materials, water bills and a string of poor yields have only served to make peasant

Class time in the local Koranic school.

January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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A woman shows her hands ravaged by blisters,a telltale sign of arsenic poisoning.

Bangladesh’s arsenic poisoning: who is to blame? Thirty years ago, Bangladeshi villages began pumping arsenic-laced water FRED PEARCE U.K.-based science journalist

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he story beggars belief. In the 1970s, international agencies headed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) began pumping millions of dollars of aid money into Bangladesh for tubewells to provide “clean” drinking water. According to the World Health Organization,the direct result has been the biggest outbreak of mass poisoning in history. Up to half the country’s tubewells, now estimated to number 10 million, are poisoned. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands will die. Why? Because nobody tested for the

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natural poison, arsenic, widely found in underground water. And when a doctor did find traces of the metal, and when Bangladeshi villagers did start turning up at doctors’ surgeries with the tumours and telltale signs of arsenic poisoning, the results were swiftly buried so that nobody made the connection. Even now as the scale of the calamity emerges, nobody is admitting culpability. Not UNICEF, which initiated the tubewells programme and paid for the first 900,000 wells, nor the World Bank, a fellow sponsor. Not the Bangladeshi government, or the foreign engineers and public health scientists who did not think to test the water for so long. The same agencies that played godmother to the catastrophe are now wringing their hands and saying it will

likely take 30 years to find all the poisoned tubewells—longer than it took to sink them all. So why are the authorities and international experts proving incapable of coming up with a solution? The roots of the problem go back to the early 1970s when most Bangladeshis living in the countryside relied on surface ponds and rivers for their drinking water. Sewage bacteria, however, unleashed a battery of water-borne disease which killed a quarter of a million children each year, according to the World Bank. So UNICEF sought to solve the problem by instigating a massive tubewell project to tap into underground water sources, despite warnings by some local people that they were pumping the “devil’s water.” UNICEF explains today that “at the

P L A N E T ◗ time, standard procedures for testing the safety of groundwater did not include tests for arsenic [which] had never before been found in the kind of geological formations that exist in Bangladesh.” But many geochemists,such as John McArthur at University College London, scoff at such a suggestion. They blame dogma among public health people with no knowledge of geology, and who equated underground water with safe water. Who knew what and when? The Bangladeshi government claims that cases of arsenic contamination came to its attention in 1993 and concluded two years later that the poisoning was widespread, with tubewell water the likely cause. But according to Quazi Quamruzzaman of the Dhaka Community Hospital, the government was told as early as 1985 that Bangladeshis crossing the border into West Bengal were being diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. Arsenic is a slow killer. The most obvious signs are the blisters found on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, which can eventually turn gangrenous and cancerous. Meanwhile,the poison also attacks internal organs, notably the lungs and kidneys, which can result in a battery of illnesses including cancers. Despite the mounting evidence of contamination, there were no investigations. The World Bank also maintains that “before 1993, groundwater was never tested for arsenic,” according to Babar Kabir, hydrogeologist and head of the organization’s water department. But Peter Ravenscroft,an engineer based in Dhaka for the British engineering consultancy firm Mott MacDonald,who worked extensively for international aid agencies on the tubewell programme, says he first found arsenic in groundwaters in the late 1980s and published his findings in 1990. Yet it wasn’t until 1998 that the international community finally appeared to accept some responsibility for solving the mass poisoning of Bangladesh. The World Bank announced an emergency three-year programme to identify the killer tubewells using simple tests and to “put in motion concrete actions [to] combat a major health crisis with devastating effects on the lives of millions.” With almost every one of the country’s 68,000 villages potentially at risk, the Bank said it would initially survey 4,000 villages and draw up action plans for each. This “fast-track project” was to be the first phase in a 15-year programme to screen the country’s tubewells. But the “fast-track” programme took another year to negotiate between the international agencies and the Bangladeshi government, pushing its

completion date to late 2002. And inquiries by the UNESCO Courier have revealed that the programme remains mired.Richard Wilson,a leading analyst of the crisis from Harvard University’s department of public health, says “the project is stalled.” He blames the Bangladeshi government’s failure to “decide how to spend the money” and says that leading officers at the Bank are

“Bangladesh has become an experimental station of Western countries.” privately “most upset about it.” The Bank denies this publicly.Khawaja Minnatullah, a water specialist at the World Bank’s Dhaka office,says:“It is not stalled. There is now steady progress after an initial slow pace.” But so far, he says, only 800 villages have been screened,little more than one percent of the country’s villages. And few if any action plans have been completed because, says Minnatullah, scientists have failed to find a “proven, affordable” method of removing arsenic from village pumps. While little changes in the lives of

most villagers, local scientist and activist Dipankar Chakraborti (see box) is shocked to find a flood of foreign consultants gearing up for a junket on an even bigger scale than the original tubewell programme. “I cannot accept that 50 percent of the fund will go to foreign consultants. Bangladesh has become an experimental station of Western countries.” Not that indigenous action has had a flying start.The Bangladeshi government created a steering committee which in turn set up an expert committee in September 2000 “to detect the causes of arsenic contamination across the country”—a matter that most experts believed to have been long since resolved. While the official programme has stuttered, many non-governmental organizations—and none more so than Chakraborti and his colleagues at the Dhaka Community Hospital—have been filling the gap. But the task is far too big for any NGO. Shahida Azfar, UNICEF’s representative in Dhaka, told a conference in the city last May that “to date, only 250,000 tubewells have been tested. If we keep this up it will take us 30 years to complete the testing.” And now it appears that even this baleful calculation may be optimistic. According to Minnatullah, screening of the first 800 villages revealed 70 percent more pumps than estimated beforehand. “Current observations indicate that there are about 10 million handpumps,” he told the UNESCO Courier—more than twice

Sounding the alarm ipankar Chakraborti is the man who brought the arsenic crisis to international attention— first in his native West Bengal and then later in Bangladesh. Now the director of environmental studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta,Chakraborti first began investigations as a young researcher in 1988. After hearing about unusual health problems among villagers during a visit to his parents’ West Bengali village, he sent water samples for testing at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, which reported high levels of arsenic. By 1992,Chakraborti realized that the crisis in West Bengal was merely the prelude to a much bigger calamity over the border in Bangladesh. In one West Bengali village, he found a lone woman suffering from arsenic symptoms, while her family and neighbours were not.She said she had come from Bangladesh after marrying,and that other people back home had similar symptoms doctors assumed were linked to leprosy. For five years now, Chakraborti has collaborated with doctors from the Dhaka Community Hospital, which specializes in providing cheap health care for the poor. Together, they have been surveying the scale of the Bangladeshi problem, treating the poisoned and exposing the epidemic to the wider world. In April 2000, he published the results of 240 days in the field. During that time, the team analyzed water samples from 22,000 tubewells in 54 of the country’s 64 districts, as well as 11,000 hair, nail and urine samples. They found 900 villages with arsenic levels above the government limit. For Chakraborti, this is “only the tip of the iceberg.” ■

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Shanta is one of many villages in which women continue to draw poisoned water.

as many as assumed when the programme was set up. Indeed the WHO released a report in September estimating that between 35 and 77 million Bangladeshis may be

drinking water containing more than the safety limit of 10 parts per billion of arsenic.According to the report’s author, Allan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, the scale of the

Where does the arsenic come from? he arsenic probably originates in the Himalayan headwaters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, and has lain undisturbed beneath the surface of the region’s deltas for thousands of years in thick layers of fine alluvial mud smeared across the area by the rivers. According to David Kinniburgh of the British Geological Survey, who has recently completed a detailed study of the arsenic’s route into millions of tubewells, the arsenic concentration in the mud is not extraordinary. Time is the culprit. The mud in Bangladesh lies thicker, wider and flatter than almost anywhere on Earth. It can take hundreds or thousands of years for underground water to percolate through the mud before reaching the sea.All the while it is absorbing arsenic. This, says Kinniburgh, helps explain the diverse pattern of arsenic concentrations in tubewell waters. The contaminated wells almost all take water from a depth of 20 to 100 metres. Shallower wells are clean because they contain mostly recent rainwater or water flowing swiftly through the sediments. Deeper wells tap water in older sediments which have by now been flushed clean of arsenic. It will take thousands of years, says Kinniburgh, before the rest of the arsenic will wash away into the Indian Ocean. Many underground water sources around the world contain arsenic. Parts of Taiwan,Argentina, Chile and China have all suffered epidemics of skin diseases, gangrene and cancer as a result. Smith’s analysis of the Taiwan epidemic in particular helped set the WHO arsenic standards for water and is the basis for his current predictions. Bangladesh, he says, is quite unprecedented.

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disaster is “beyond Bhopal; beyond Chernobyl.” There is no way yet of predicting which of the country’s tubewells is safe and which carries a promise of disease and death.A study by David Kinniburgh of the British Geological Survey, published in June 2000, found that neighbouring villages,and often even neighbouring households, drink water with vastly different levels of poisoning. There is no alternative, he concluded, but to test almost every tubewell in the country (see box). It seems likely that water from about half of all the country’s tubewells, in more than 40,000 villages, exceeds the WHO limit, many by several hundred times, according to the health organization.The figure may be rising. Chakraborti recently reported disturbing new evidence from Faridpur district where some wells tested in 1995 as safe are becoming contaminated. The amount of arsenic in the water is a few parts per million at most. But over the years it accumulates. It can take a decade or more of drinking poisoned water before the physical symptoms emerge. Official figures show some 8,500 people have been diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. But nobody doubts that there is massive under-reporting in Bangladesh’s largely rural and desperately poor population of 128 million,for whom there is no national health service. “Twenty thousand people could die

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each year,” according to the UN Development Programme. The possible death toll is difficult to calculate because some cancers typically take 20 years to emerge. Smith estimates that in many parts of southern Bangladesh, one in ten adult deaths could soon be from arsenictriggered cancers of internal organs, such as the bladder and lungs. People are made more vulnerable by poor nutrition, the large volumes of water they drink (typically five litres a day, says Chakraborti), and because they may ingest more arsenic through eating rice irrigated by poisoned water and then boiled in it. “So far as we know there is no medicine available for chronic arsenic toxicity,” says Quamruzzaman of Dhaka Community Hospital.The only treatment is safe water, nutritious food and time. This can clear up the skin blotches on people in the early stages of poisoning. But once gangrene and cancer have taken hold they may be beyond hope. Where is the situation worst? Chakraborti says “one of the worst villages I have ever visited” is Stadium Para in Meherpur district, right on the border with India. Here nine residents have already died of cancerous ulcers caused by arsenic. One was only 25 years old. But, after five years of surveying, he nominates the southeastern village of Seladi as “in all probability the most arsenic-contaminated village in the world.” Here 72 out of 73 tubewells are contaminated. No fewer than 21 contain arsenic at more than 1,000 parts per billion, and the highest at 4,000 ppb, or four hundred times the WHO limit. In some villages almost everyone is affected. In other villages, only a minority are poisoned. But they may suffer worst of all. “Nobody wants to come in contact with them,” says Jinat Nahar Jitu of Dhaka Community Hospital. “They are barred from coming out of their homes or even from using water from clean wells.”Wives

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What next? n the first step of the mammoth task of testing the country’s tubewells, volunteers, aid workers and officials paint the dangerous ones red, which should only be used for washing. The villagers are supposed to use the safe wells exclusively for drinking, but that’s not easy when the lucky one is found in someone else’s backyard. In the longer run, part of the answer lies in sinking deeper wells to tap cleaner water. But it will take millions of dollars to install these wells in addition to the needed surface tanks and distribution pipes. Also some deep tubewells in West Bengal have started bringing up arsenic months or years after they were opened. Another idea is to adopt traditional methods such as ponds and tanks to “harvest”rainwater. This will work in some places, says Shahida Azfar from UNICEF, but “there is not enough rain all year for that to be feasible as the main strategy.” Could the tubewell waters be treated? While a large number of ideas for filters and chemical treatments have been tried out in the past two years, there is “no proven affordable arsenic removal technology available yet,” according to Khawaja Minnatullah of the World Bank. Most experts warn against blanket solutions. Each village needs its own plan. And none of them can begin planning until it knows which of its tubewells are pouring poison into villagers’ buckets.

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are divorced and children turned away from schools, primarily out of an unfounded fear that they may infect others. That is what happened to Pinjra Begam, a pretty 15-year-old, shortly after her marriage in 1988 to Masud Rana, a mill-worker.Her skin became mottled and blotchy, the tell tale signs of arsenicosis. The blotches turned to ugly sores that became gangrenous. Her husband left her for another. Cancer took hold and spread to her lungs. She finally died in her home village of Miapur Paschim Para, near the banks of the River Ganges, in May last year, aged just 26. She left three children, aged seven, five and one. Soon Pinjra’s

children will also likely develop the same symptoms as the arsenic levels accumulate in their bodies. There are some technical solutions to providing safe drinking water for the people of Bangladesh—albeit hard to execute in such a poor, ill-educated and rural countryside (see box). But first the millions of dangerous tubewells have to be identified. The slow progress of the World Bank programme so far could prove a mortal blow. In his September report, Smith warned that “the worst thing that can possibly be done is nothing.” But for most Bangladeshis caught up in this disaster, nothing is exactly what is being done. ■

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Members of a local NGO speaking with women in the village of Khazanagar.

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Your turn now: a classmate in full swing,in a French school that puts integration into practice.

Breaking down the divide Europe is all for giving its “different” children a place in regular schools, but the debate over integration is far from sealed BY CYNTHIA GUTTMAN

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nrolling a child at the local public school is a painless exercise for most European parents—unless of course, their child happens to be “different.” In that case, where they live is still likely to determine whether the child is welcomed into a regular classroom or guided towards a special school. “Having a child with Down’s syndrome, I realized that the school was not against the principle but was apprehensive because it lacked the means to welcome her,” recalls Sophie Cluzel, a mother of four living in a Paris suburb. What ensued was a battle, via an association, with the Education Ministry to win the right to a special assistant, 80 percent financed by the state and reserved for the 18-to-26 age bracket as part of a pro-youth employment policy. Having been granted her request, Cluzel went

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knocking on company doors to come up with the remaining 20 percent. Now, as part of a collective of parents representing both physically and mentally handicapped children, funds for 20 more such assistants have been granted. “If it weren’t for the drive by families, you wouldn’t get anywhere. Even if school is compulsory, too much rests on the goodwill of teachers or inspectors.”

A shift from a medical model to an inclusive approach Since a government-commissioned report lamented France’s slow progress on the integration front, a set of widely applauded measures have been introduced to speed up the process,notably by getting different groups—parents, education and social workers—talking with each other. They are not alone in this quest: along with Finland,Greece and the Netherlands,more than half of the country’s disabled students are in special schools. At the other end of the spectrum, Italy, a country deeply influenced by the anti-psychiatry

movement of the late 1960s, presents the most extreme example of an all-out integration policy, with less than two percent of handicapped children in special schools, followed by Spain and Portugal, with roughly 18 percent. But does this necessarily mean that integration is the only politically acceptable route? First of all, it is not always an either-or scenario, since many countries have “multi-track systems” offering a wider choice, notably special classes in regular schools with certain shared hours. But considerable efforts over the past 10 to 15 years to make schools more inclusive— open to all children—has changed the way of looking at handicaps. “There has been a shift from a medical model towards a more pedagogical approach, starting from the principle that children have different capacities and needs,” says Victoriana Soriano from the European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, which has conducted in-depth studies on the issue. In the current climate, countries

W O R L D would be hard put to take an antiinclusion line.What prevails is a system of “guided choice.” The UN community, notably via U NESCO, has been instrumental in advocating inclusion.The European Commission makes integration a guiding principle of its education programmes. “From there on,it is up to member states to apply these principles according to their systems,” says the Commission’s Georgia Henningsen.“All our activities aim to stimulate action and raise awareness,” she says, referring to projects, networks and research conducted on furthering integration.“The advantage of an integrated approach,” she says,“is that when you make a special effort for those with special needs on the teaching front, everyone profits, because there are always students at the back of the class.” But for everyone to profit, that extra little effort has to be made.“Inclusion can work perfectly well under certain circumstances, but those are not commonly met,” says the OECD’s Peter Evans, a special education expert. For one, “teacher training is not a very inclusive exercise.” In some countries, student teachers spend no more than twelve hours of their whole training on disabled students, in others half a year, while in yet others it is part of the weekly schedule.The result is a fear of losing face before the unknown.“Teachers don’t have the tools and they’re aware of it,” says Soriano. Not surprisingly, teacher unions tend to be in favour of maintaining the status quo, and represent a “substantial force,” according to Evans, when it comes to making decisions on integration. Even when they do fully endorse the integration principle, many teachers and school principals complain about the disproportionate work load involved through extra report writing, meetings with expert committees, etc.

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was hired, who is learning on the job while waiting for an answer to an application for further training. According to the school principal, “specialized teachers have had enough of not being recognized.” For Cor Meijer, a researcher with the European Agency, financial mechanisms largely explain the continued discrepancy between policy and practice. Take the Netherlands: an integration policy was set up in the 1960s and 70s but no incentive was given to encourage the shift.“In fact, the structure rewards segregation,in spite of what the government proclaims,” says Meijer, who is Dutch.This is set to change. Parliament just approved a bill to allocate funds to regions based on their total number of children, rather than distinguishing between those with special needs and those without, a system that tends to favour vested interests.

Staging cultural events to change our perceptions Numbers, however, tend to say little about quality, about which there is scant information.Some parents strongly believe that it’s better in special schools, notably in countries operating a fairly large system. A recent study in England found that bullying was “the main factor” driving disabled children out of regular schools. “It’s not because children are integrated that the problem is solved,” says Soriano. “I’m all for the most comprehensive legislation possible, but we won’t be able to speak about equal opportunity until we give top priority to more in-depth work on pedagogy.”The problem is particularly acute at the secondary level.“Specialized schools are in a delicate situation, they see teenagers arriving who cannot go any further in the mainstream,” says Catherine Cousergue, a French doctor specialized in integration matters.“So they think that at the end of the day regular schools are a failure and that kids would have been

better off there from the outset.” Meijer foresees another paradox on the horizon: schools are increasingly held accountable for quality—namely turning out good crops of students—while being asked to cater for lower-achieving groups. Aren’t the most vulnerable children likely to be pushed out? Beyond this is the issue of mentality. For Francis Degryse, the parent of a handicapped seven-year old daughter, the key is to “change our perception of the disabled.” He notched up an improbable success by getting a blind director to stage a show featuring only disabled actors to a full house in a prestigious Paris venue. Such cultural events have now become a yearly affair, and aim to become European. Through his association “Without Drums Nor Trumpets,” he organizes puppet shows in regular schools to “take some of the drama” out of mental and physical handicaps, has produced a CD and is looking for backers to set up a web T Vo n the disabled.“You have to know how to impose yourself and be tenacious. For we can all live together.” This is probably the most convincing argument for inclusion. “Parents in general are very supportive, they believe it is a good lesson in tolerance for their children,” says a French principal whose school includes two special classes for the handicapped.“You can always give all the civic education courses you want,” says Cousergue “but when you have a handicapped mate next to you in class everyday, it’s a different story. It influences you for adult life: the day you have a handicapped colleague, you’ll look at things in an altogether different way.” ■ www.european-agency.org www.unesco.org/education/educprog/sne www.eurydice.org www.socrates.org

Transforming special schools into resource centres The other camp that governments have to contend with are the special education structures themselves.The task underway—as in Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands—is to transform them into “resource centres” for mainstream schools, tapping the expertise of their teachers and staff without cutting jobs. Then there is the question of how teachers skilled at working with disabled children are treated. In France, for example, there is a dearth of candidates applying to become specialized teachers. In a Parisian primary school with two classes for children with Down’s syndrome, no specialized teachers applied for the post when it was advertised.A regular teacher

Getting ready to jump in with everyone else.

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The new p Contents 1/ Twilight for farmers? 18 The last days of the fellahs Claude Guibal

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A knife at the throat of half a billion farmers Michel Bessières, with Rolf Künnemann and Krishna Ghimire

2/ Hot spots 24 Brazil: And the meek shall occupy the earth Kintto Lucas

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Poverty amidst plenty: a Punjabi tale Kumkum Dasgupta

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Bangladesh: the seeds of change Kamal Mostafa Majumder

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“GMOs: the wrong answer to the wrong problem” Interview with Rafael Mariano

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France: mad cows and studious farmers Michel Bessières

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Rage against the exodus: ithe crisis in China’s land reform Anne Loussouarn

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Biovillages: a blueprint for the future?

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ome 1.3 billion people may be tilling their fields and tending livestock today, but in the near future, about 500 million of them might well see their way of life disappear. They simply cannot compete in the race towards greater yields spurred on by globalization (pp. 20-23).Agro-business is snuffing out family farms despite their potential for sustainable development so desperately needed to end hunger and environmental degradation. An aged but wizened Egyptian peasant, Iskandar Khalil, accepts the bitter truth that his son cannot succeed him by cultivating the land his family has tilled for generations (pp. 18-19). But many other farmers refuse to accept this fate and are joining forces to promote alternative modes of agriculture. In Brazil, the movement of landless workers has taken hold of agrarian reform to launch a new set of social and commercial relations (pp. 24-26). In South Asia, where the Green Revolution has shown its limits, Bangladeshis are benefiting from the success of organic farming (pp. 27-29). Meanwhile, small farmers in the Philippines are joining the ranks of the international movement against genetically-modified organisms to assert their independence from multinationals and defend the environment (pp. 30-31).With rising fears over pollution and food quality, livestock breeders and consumers in France have forged a new alliance to promote safe and environmentally respectful food (pp. 34-35). Even in China, the world’s largest peasant population is finding itself rocked by the liberalization wave (pp. 34-35). Finally, M.S. Swaminathan, one of the fathers of the Green Revolution and an ardent Indian environmentalist, makes the case for the “biovillages”surrounding Pondicherry because “jobless economic growth is joyless growth.”

M. S. Swaminathan

Dossier concept and coordination by Ethirajan Anbarasan and Michel Bessières, UNESCO Courier journalists

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SEEDS OF WRATH...

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T FAMILY FA O RMING: THE “THIRD WAY” OUT BY MARTÍN REJTMAN

Argentine filmmaker, director of SILVIA P RIETO (1999)

MOUSSA PARA DIALLO President of the Fouta-Djalon Peasants’ Federation and of the Peasant Organizations of Guinea

Quand on est cinéaste et qu’on a la chance que l’un de ses films soit primé à un festival, on peut accompagner l’œuvre élue à travers Wherelewe monde. live, inC’est the une mountainous occasion exceptionnelle Fouta-Djalon region de se faire of northern connaître Guinea – une —known nécessité pour as nous West qui A appartenons frica’s “wàades ter systèmes tower”—the de production peasants excentrés have only– very mais small c’est aussi plots, le just moyen a few de se hundred rendre compte square que metres l’oneach. n’est pas seul dans sa solitude. J’ai During vécuthe cette rainy expérience season, they de cinéaste harvest pèlerin.A rice and Berlin,Nantes, maize for Rotterdam their own ou cSounnsduam ncpe, tioaux n, and Etats-Unis, tomatoes, enpotatoes rencontrant and mes onions alter to ego sell. de In Ta good iwantimes , de Corée, and bad, du Japon they earn ou between d’Iran, j’ai $200 vérifié and $270 qu’il aexiste year, un which vigoureux they somehow courantmake de rénovation do with. du cinéEverything ma.Avant tout, is farilaway.To vient d’Asie, get a simple mais il coïncide bolt for a machine,we aussi avecsometimes le réveil have latinoto go all amthe ériway cainto . Tous the capital,C ces films onakry.We diffèrent. don’t Po have urtlegal ant, malgré title tol’absence our land,de which cohérence means esthétique that we can’t stand ou upthématique, to individuals ortothe us participent government d’une when they même want volonté to claimdeit.se mesurer We don’t avec have la réalité enough et tous labour. ontTh étée young tournésare avec all leaving, des moyens especially limités. the men, andJ’ai often réalisé for abroad.We l’un de mes ’refilvery ms, Rshort apadof o, money avec l’argent to modernize que m’avait our farms.We octroyé have le Festival to pay about de Rotterdam 30 percentpour interest écrire if we un stake ynopsout is. Une loans somme from justegovernmentsuffisante, en E controlled urope, pour credit financer agencies le premier and jet private d’un scénario permet à un cinéaste indépendant argentin de produire un long métrage.

17 The Unesco Courier - January 2001

Disposer de peu d’argent n’est pas une fin en soi mais oblige à garder l’esprit affûté et à trouver des solutions narratives abanks. daptées. Nous puisons dans le vivier des écoles Yetde despite cinémaallpour this,recruter we’re managing des artistes to et produce des techniciens crops that débutants,en are competitive leur offrant on the un accès domestic à la market,not profession.just Au compared Japon, les with indépendants other national font de même. products but also foreign On dénombre ones, since aujourd’hui the market was plustotally de 15 opened écoles de upcinéma a decade à Buenos ago.When Aiwe res.decide Cette on prolifération something, traduit we carry la vitalité it through du septième to the eanrtd,.We le do désir whatlargement we say we’ll partagé do.We don’t de lie s’exprimer to people.We par show ce biais. them results.Th Ailleurs, aet’s n why Occidwe’re ent, le successful. cinéma a-t-il perdu de son intérêt? The Il Fouta-Djalon compte encore de Peasants’ grands cFederation, réateurs, mais founded comment in 1992, un réalisateur today has 12,500 américain members, ou européen two-thirds ne se sentirait-il of them pas wombridé en, who parshare des schémas farm workéculés equally et étouffé with men. par la It surconsommation buys seeds and fertilizer d’images, cheaply liée à l’omniprésence to sell to the members. de la télévision? It builds barnEn s, roads Iran, and il estbridges encoreand possible runs literacy d’avoir un courses. regard Itsinnocent, 18 expertsdehelp filmer the son peasants sujet comme to improve s’il n’avait their jamais farming encore methods, été porté but there à l’écran. aren’t Le cinéma enoughiranien peoplea like la candeur them. The des «premières federation also fois»,gives il enclasses tire sa force.A in basic Ta accounting iwan, les and conditions how tosont sell products tout autres, to m mais erclà haaussi,les nts. Foreign cinéastes aid organizations ont su retrouver and l’innocence NGOs helpenusinterrogeant in variousleways, passéwd’une hich société qui doute d’elle-même,en cultivant l’étonnement que suscite l’étrangeté

même de la vie. Le Japon est encore différent, ses jeunes réalisateurs héritent d’une longue tradition, mais ils sont works confrontés out àatlaroughly multiplication $40 per desmember chaînes each de télévision, year. à l’omniprésence des jeux vidéItotook s. L’expansion us time because sans précédent we’re dealing de l’univers with long-term audiovisuel development. ne laisse D aucune onors often place want à l’innocence, quick results,elle but force we know au détournement that if we go too des fast, codes, we’llà leur fall flat utilisation on our m facae.The licieusresult e, inteisllthere igente. forDans all to les see.filOmusr potato japonaiyields s, comme are dans now ceux 3,000 de kilos Hongper Ko hecntag,re. lesFrom metteurs 1992 en to 1998, scènewe jouent managed avec to les get clichés thede government la publicité,de to la block vidéo,ou foreign du potato film de genre imports et les at harvest utilisenttime. pourWe raconter don’t need d’autres thathistoires, protection susciter any more. de nouvelles émoAgro-industry tions. costs the country and the L’éclosion consumer adelot cesof«nouvelles money. It has vagues» also failed est sans because doute liée peasants à la réduction are not just – et part dans of certains the economy, cas, àth laeysuppression ’re also part–of des society, aides d’Etat local culture au cinéma.Hormis and the environment. les Etats-Unis,o So ù l’industrie developing countries bénéficiehave d’untolarge take another marché intérieur path—a “third captif,la way”—the majorité des path autres of family pays fsoutenaient arming, but an laimproved production version nationale. of it. AujGuinea ourd’huiis, les still systèmes not self-sufficient de subventions and arrivent imports rice à épuisement from southeast et A làsiaoù . Bils ut can fonctionnent we keepencore, on appealing l’argent va to toujours foreign countries aux mêmes. toFaisons feed usun when rêve: that’s et si our les Etats job? favorisaient cette éclosion sauvage que ■ l’on constate sous diverses latitudes? Leur retrait et l’émergence des

January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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1. TWILIGHT FOR FARMERS?

The last days of the fellahs Iskandar works his farm on the outskirts of Cairo, earning enough to get by but not enough to ensure that his children stay loyal to the land CLAUDE GUIBAL Cairo-based correspondent for the French daily LIBÉRATION

Hand-in-hand with his

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he sail of the felucca gently subsides. Its hull bumps quietly against the old jetty made out of bits of driftwood.A donkey brays in greeting. With their sleeves and skirts tucked up, women crouch at the river’s edge washing kitchen utensils in the murky waters of the Nile. Embraced by the two arms of the river, Dahab island is an odd place,where life still revolves around the harvest. Here, the incessant bustle of Cairo, the Egyptian capital less than a kilometre away, does not intrude. Iskandar Khalil was born on this five-kilometre spit of land. For the last 50 years, he has remained

with his fields and his crops, carrying on the 5,000year tradition of the fellahin (peasants) of the Nile who live in tune with the moods of the river in the dry and rainy seasons. To get to his farm at the southern end of the island,you have to follow dirt paths alongside tiny plots of land, go through the village where nobody has ever seen a car or a tractor and pick your way through the mud. The outline of a plane or the black hulk of the Kabbah shrine in Mecca1 painted on the walls of some houses recall pilgrimages to the holy city of Islam,but the faded state of the drawings suggests no-one here has been able to make the trip for quite a while. January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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Iskandar’s house has a white cross besides the door.The bell-tower of the imposing village church dwarfs the nearby minaret as if to remind the visitor that most of the islanders are Copts. “When my father died,” says Iskandar, “my three brothers and I divided up his land between us. I got just over three feddans (1.3 hectares) and half the house. The other half went to my elder brother. Since then, I haven’t been able to expand.” Iskandar lives with his wife and children in three rooms. A spotless white-tiled floor recently laid over the bare earth stands out in the spartanly furnished house, as does the television that takes pride of place in the living-room, just as in nearly every peasant home of the Nile valley. The daughter of the family married at 14 and went off with her fellah husband to his home village on “the mainland,” near the Pyramids.Three other children, all boys between 17 and 21, are unmarried and still at home, perhaps for a long time to come. Getting married is expensive. The groom has to provide a house for his bride and Iskandar has no savings to help out his sons. “The little money I have goes on fertilizer or weedkiller,” he says. In front of his house, in fields that are precisely marked out and irrigated by canals leading from the Nile, Iskandar grows fodder for his sheep and 10 cows along with enough maize to make bread for the family all year round. On another plot, he grows tomatoes and cucumbers he takes each week to sell in Old Cairo’s market, where he pays a small tax for a stand. He returns to the island with cooking oil, sugar and an average of a kilo of meat per month.

“On the island the air is cleaner and there’s no noise to bother us” Every morning, his wife milks the cows, Egyptian- bred creatures with high-ridged backs and big udders. She takes the surplus of about 20 or 30 litres to the opposite bank of the river to a tanker truck, bringing back about 10 Egyptian pounds ($3.50).These are the only links the Khalil family has with the world of money. Iskandar has never been into a bank and knows nothing about credit. He figures that his earnings average 150 Egyptian pounds per month ($55). But saving is out of the question:once he’s paid for fertilizers, weedkillers and everyday goods, he has the equivalent of $6 left, which he keeps carefully in a wardrobe.This is money for special purposes, like buying a pair of sandals or a piece of cloth, and for paying the annual land tax of approximately $14. No wonder expanding is just about impossible: besides the tax, a feddan of land (0.42 hectares) costs nearly $5,700. The Khalil family, like all Nile valley farmers, are mainly self-sufficient, eating what they produce and keeping chickens and geese, who mingle freely with the cows amid the heaps of manure. In his field of maize,where the plants come up to his shoulder,Iskandar gazes at the nearby skyscrapers

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of Cairo’s wealthy Maadi neighbourhood. “Cairo’s very beautiful,” he says.“I like watching well-dressed people go by. But here on the island,the air is cleaner and there’s no noise to bother us.”

“We have to use chemicals to get the earth to produce as much as possible”

He was right, the one who said that agriculture is the mother and nurse of all the other arts.

Like the other 200 islanders, Iskandar has never lived anywhere else. He married a Dahab girl who was a cousin. Tall and strong with a radiant look and grey hair tucked under a black headscarf, she and their three sons help him in the fields all day. But the land is too small to be divided up between the sons. “I’d like them to spend their lives here, close to me, Xenophon, but when they get married they’ll have to go and Greek historian work in the city. Farming’s too hard now and you (430-355 B.C.) don’t earn enough.” Still, his family count their blessings: no one has ever been seriously ill and they’ve rarely had to go to a healthcare centre, generally financed by charitable or religious organizations. Sometimes Iskandar dreams of another life. If he had been born elsewhere, he too would have probably moved to Cairo, where he says, “life is easier and much less tiring.” He does not understand how city-dwellers can envy his life and smiles at the thought. Manual labour and the heat of the sun have dried up his skin. On market days, when he loads heavy boxes of vegetables onto his cart, he feels his thin, gnarled arms are not as strong as they were. In the evening, on his way back from the fields, he stops to chat with the menfolk of the village.“Copts or Muslims, we’re all fellahin and we help each other,” he says. This is the hour when the wind carries the sounds of the big city.The bridge built across the river a year K EYFIGURES , EGYPT ago to link the two parts of the city on its south side rumbles with the sound of traffic. But Dahab sleeps. Total population: Here the day begins and ends with the sun. If he feels 67 million (1999) like staying awake for a while, Iskandar turns on the GNP per capita: TV. “I like knowing what’s happening in other US$ 1,400 (1999) places,” he says. But he has never heard of genetically Agricultural workers as share of modified food or angry European farmers.“What’s total labour force: the problem?” he says.“We have to use chemicals to 33 % (2000) get the earth to produce as much as possible. I use 57 % (1980) them. If I didn’t, what would I live on?” Agriculture as share of GDP: He and his wife know they won’t starve.The soil 16 % (1999) of Dahab has always fed the family. Last year’s 18 % (1980) harvest wasn’t bad. But Iskandar also knows his Sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank. dream of building a “comfortable concrete house, like in the city” where the whole family can live together will never come true. He adjusts his blue ● Robin Mason. gallabeya robes, strokes his chin and looks towards Globalising Education: the capital again.“I’ll be a bit ashamed when my sons leave the island,” he says. “They’ll be the first in our family not to be farmers.” ■ 1. The Kaaba is a shrine within the Great Mosque of Mecca towards which Muslims turn during prayer. The Black Stone, an object of veneration, is built into its eastern wall. January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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1. TWILIGHT FOR FARMERS?

A knife at the throat of half a billion farmers Free trade threatens to drive half the world’s farmers off the land, even though they hold the key to feeding the world and protecting the environment MICHEL BESSIÈRES, WITH ROLF KÜNNEMANN AND KRISHNA GHIMIRE Respectively UNESCO COURIER journalist, member of the NGO Foodfirst Information and Action Network and researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (Unrisd)

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The secret of good policy is to make those who cultivate the land for the good of others die of hunger. Voltaire, French philosopher (1694-1778)

n the 1950s, an African farmer produced ten quintals of grain, says Marcel Mazoyer 1, professor at the national agronomical institute in Paris. He kept eight to feed his family, and had two left over to sell on the market at $29 per quintal (at current rates). He thus had $57 of income to cover basic expenses.Today, with a quintal fetching less than $14, he must sell four to obtain the same amount and purchase vital necessities. He can no longer feed his family, much less make a profit that would enable him to invest in ways to increase production. His chances of living, or rather eking a living off the earth dwindle with each passing day. A farmer in the Punjab could “modernize”his farm thanks to the Green Revolution (see box, p. 22). Fifteen years ago, he used $30 worth of fertilizers to harvest a tonne of grain (see article, pp. 27-28).Today, soil depletion and the harmful effects of uncontrolled irrigation force him to spend $80 for the same amount of produce.Meanwhile, the market

price has dropped and self-sufficiency has become impossible. He must sell his harvests to purchase a good part of his food, seeds, fertilizer and pesticides. The outcome is inevitable:this farmer will have to sell his land to pay back his creditors. These two case studies are not unusual among the world’s 1.3 billion farmers and agricultural workers2. In the developed countries, including eastern Europe, only 45 million farmers, or roughly seven percent of the working population, are left. In the developing world, they account for over half the working population, men and women combined.On average, each farmer cultivates one hectare and harvests one tonne of produce.Almost none owns a tractor.Threequarters do not even own an animal to pull a plough. Over half of these southern farmers suffer from chronic malnutrition: three-quarters of the 800 million human beings who go hungry every day are impoverished farmers.The little that they manage to sell has lost half its worth during the past 30 years.

TO KNOW MORE ● Robin Mason. Globalising Education: Trends and Applications. Routledge, 1998

Sources: UNFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

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“With such low income, they can afford neither tools, nor selected seeds, nor fertilizers; they can barely survive,” says Dr. Mazoyer. And they must confront a growing threat: the opening of borders, which puts them in direct competition with the northern hemisphere’s industrial agro-businesses, whose productivity per farmer may be up to 1,000 times higher. “Agro-business” is relatively recent: it did not become widespread in developed countries until after the Second World War. Until then, family farming had predominated since the agrarian reform that followed the dismantling of feudal properties. Agro-business relies on increasingly advanced technology based on mechanization, chemistry (fertilizers and herbicides), the selection of seeds and ever-costlier investments.The results are mixed.

Footing the bill of a model stretched to the limits On the one hand, productivity has skyrocketed in the north. Grain yields per hectare are an average of two-and-a-half times higher than they were 40 years ago; on the most efficient farms, a single farmer working alone can cultivate 300 hectares. These productivity gains have been higher than in manufacturing and services. They have resulted in continuously dropping produce prices, and therefore in a steady decline in the amount of income that consumers spend on food. On the other hand,the limits of this model are increasingly obvious. The outbreak of “mad cow” disease provides some idea of the ravages that highyield,industrial farming can cause. Environmental damage—polluted aquifers, soil depletion, decreasing biodiversity—is on the rise.This form of agriculture guzzles 70 percent of potable water consumed. And now it is suffering from a backlash,

Returning from the fields of Gujarat, India.

AGRICULTURE AND THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION he 1994 Marrakesh accords setting up the WTO include an Agreement on Agriculture. During the negotiations, the world’s two great food powers—the United States and Europe—argued in favour of liberalization, as long as it protected their farmers’ interests. The Cairns group—14 of the world’s leading food exporters, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand,Argentina and Brazil—took a hard line in defense of free trade. Poor developing countries barely made themselves heard. The final agricultural agreement contains three sections: • Market access: tariffs on imported products must gradually decrease by 36 percent. For each product, 5 percent of national consumption must be freely imported.

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• Export subsidies must also be lowered by 36 percent (in value), but not export credits, which are used extensively by the United States. • Domestic price supports must be reduced:farm price subsidies must drop by 20 percent.But member states have the right to subsidize their farmers’ income, which Europe does. Five years later, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that Europe and the United States have increased their aid to farmers, but 20 percent of them receive 80 percent of the assistance. According to the FAO, developing countries have barely increased their exports, while imports are much higher than before. A new round of talks is scheduled in 2001. ■

January 2001 --The The Unesco Courier

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Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization

Globalization could mean that the women who raise, feed and care for our milk animals earn dividends for stockholders in Geneva. Verghese Kurien (1921-), president of India’s National Dairy Development Board

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because yields and profitability have hit a ceiling. That explains why spreading genetically modified organisms is a central issue for industrial agriculture in search of a second wind. This model’s expansion also comes with an economic and social cost. The former is largely masked. Through a process that economists call “externalization,” society as a whole foots a good part of the bill. “Externalization” will continue in the future, because one day the bill for environmental damage will have to be paid. It is already present in the form of taxes which citizens pay to subsidize farmers. Most of this aid is allocated depending on production volumes and cultivated surface areas, and benefits farms that are the best suited to agro-industry;the rest are gradually sidelined. The major social cost results from the ongoing concentration of land, which, according to Rolf Künnemann of the NGO Foodfirst Information and Action Network, bears all the hallmarks of a

THE GREEN REVOLUTION n the 1950s, the Rockfeller and Ford foundations transferred farm technology to Asia, which was suffering from chronic food shortages, and Latin America, which was ravaged by land conflicts. Both areas were experiencing a rise in mass discontent, a concern in the context of the Cold War. The Green Revolution,which resulted from a massive outpouring of public funding to small, owneroccupied farms, was based on the cultivation of highyield crops such as rice and wheat,the expansion of irrigation and the spread of agro-chemicals, but without mechanization.Affecting approximately half the southern hemisphere’s farmers, it boosted their yields and, especially in Asia, helped them achieve food self-sufficiency. But the Green Revolution had little impact on the most disadvantaged areas. Elsewhere, this model is in crisis because of declining public aid in the wake of structural adjustment, harmful effects on the environment caused by the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the economic vulnerability of farmers who have shifted from mixed-crop subsistence farming to single-crop cultivation for the market. ■

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“new feudalism.” In the United States, 50,000 farms vanish every year. Polish farmers’ organizations say that their country’s membership in the European Union will spell the end of two-thirds of the country’s farms, “in the best of cases.” In the north, the casualties benefit or have benefited from social safety nets or training programmes to learn skills for new jobs in other industries, which is what approximately 50 million former farmers in the developed world did during the past half-century. But how will southern cities absorb a massive influx of people leaving the countryside when they already have 600 million inhabitants who are either unemployed or scraping by on odd jobs in the parallel economy? Yet this model in crisis is the one spreading across the planet, despite its clearly identified negative effects, especially in terms of environmental and social repercussions (see box p.23).Agro-industry has a blatant interest in conquering new markets in the south, because those in the north are saturated. But this development comes with a price: 500 million farmers in the south will be driven off the land because they lack the means to be or become competitive. The planetary spread of agro-business is based on a binary postulate that has been repeated so often it has acquired the force of truth: the only possible alternative would be either the hopeless “archaism” and immobility that characterize southern farming, or “modernization,” which would purely and simply graft the north’s industrial agricultural revolution onto the south. But, observing the effects of this type of modernization in the developing world, Ignacy Sachs and Ricardo Abromovay3 explain that “the great landed estates inherited from colonial rule are turning into agricultural companies. Their economic efficiency, assessed by macro-social standards, is questionable.” They see a new paradigm emerging:“the production of wealth goes hand-in-hand with the simultaneous reproduction of poverty.”

Time to give a chance to family farming Is there a third way? Yes, replies a chorus of agronomists and farmers: family farming which, when given a chance, breaks production records and enables farmers to earn a decent livelihood. Giving family farms a chance means first of all breaking with the urbanization policy that most governments in the developing countries have adopted. Because cities are more turbulent than the countryside, governments are trying to feed them at a lower cost. The liberalization under way is exacerbating this situation, because world farm prices are generally lower than local ones. What’s more, exports of cash crops are becoming a priority to balance trade, which is kept under close watch by the IMF and the World Bank. However, for farmers in poor countries to advance, “the fruit of their labour must be remunerated at a price which allows them to purchase additional means of production,” January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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says Mazoyer. “Without protectionism, without trade barriers, they will not be able to grow.” The second obstacle is agrarian reform. In a recent study, Krishna Ghimire, a researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD),said that land ownership remains a hidden explosive issue. The best-known case is Brazil,where 20 percent of the landowners possess 88 percent of the land (see pp. 24-26).Only a few countries have undertaken genuine agrarian reform, including Mexico in the early days of the twentieth century; Japan,Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War; China and Cuba after their revolutions.Almost everywhere else, the laws passed in the 1950s and 60s have not been applied. In southeast Asia, only India’s West Bengal and Kerala states, where 10 percent of the region’s population lives, have completed land redistribution. Furthermore, says Krishna Ghimire, the major international organizations have come round to the doctrine of “market-assisted agrarian reform,” which assumes that the law of supply and demand can be fairly applied. But how could an Egyptian agricultural worker acquire a feddan of land (0.42 hectare), which would cost him the equivalent of an entire lifetime’s income? To show the potential of the family farm, the fact that it is not a solvent market for agro-industry has to be acknowledged.Instead,it must accomplish a scientific revolution geared towards its needs and means. Only governments can undertake these substantial research efforts, which must directly involve farmers and their know-how. Between 1800 and 1940, family farms in the

northern countries tripled their gross production, then doubled it in the halfcentury that followed. Small farms do not damage the environment. They stimulate the active use of the soil, mobilize reserves of family labour and ensure high returns on investment. They benefit from subtle knowledge of the natural environment, encourage diversification as opposed to rigid specialization, and take a personal interest in quality because they consume the same produce that they sell. “The undernourishment of 800 million people is not related to insufficient world production,” says Mazoyer. “The problem is insufficient production in the poor countries.” Giving family farming a chance at last is the indispensable condition to eliminate the scourge of hunger. Farmers who are fighting for their rights are also fighting for everyone to be able to feed themselves decently and sufficiently. ■

Sources: World Bank, Global Commodity Markets, April 2000

1. Author of Histoire des agriculteurs du monde (“History of the World’s Farmers”), Seuil, Paris, 1997. 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 3. Nouvelles configurations villes-campagnes (“New town-country configurations”), published by UNESCO’s MOST programme.

KRISHNA GHIMIRE*: IS THERE A FUTURE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE? It would seem that the rural population is ageing everywhere, isn’t it? That’s something I observed while doing research on the beneficiaries of agrarian reform in the Philippines several years ago. To be fruitful,access to land must be accompanied by access to credit.Banks grant loans over 30-year periods. When a farmer is over 50,he finds himself at a dead end. Why do young people want to leave the land? First, because they don’t own any, or very little. Rural poverty increased during the 1980s as a result of structural adjustment plans that countries in debt negotiated with the IMF. That is something I observed in three cases: the Madi valley in Nepal, which opened up to agriculture in the 1960s; the Sinai desert in Egypt, which has been farmed for a dozen years;and the state of Pernambuco in Brazil. Are the three situations similar? In Nepal,the plots are too small and there is no hope of enlarging them. The future there lies in emigrating to India, where the Nepalese, who have a reputation for integrity and bravery, have locked up the securityguard market, or to the Gulf states. In Ras Sudr, Egypt, the government

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gives each family a plot of land where it grows olive trees and vegetables. The nearby tourist resorts are an outlet for their produce. These families had no hope of moving anywhere else in Egypt because inequality of land ownership is still rife. There is one overriding feeling in Ras Sudr: resignation. Are the landless Brazilian farmers more determined? Yes, the beneficiaries of agrarian reform know that in town their children will spend more and be exposed to a crime-ridden environment. Most often, they are former farm labourers who know a lot about soils and crops. But the other side of the coin is that they were wage-earners who worked in mechanized agriculture, and lack the savings mentality that characterizes farmers in Asia. I spoke with a farmer who sold his corn harvest to purchase cornmeal in a store. For every $14 he earned, he spent $13.90. Not producing the food you consume is incomprehensible to me. ■ * Researcher and chief project manager on agrarian reform and civil society at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva.

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2. HOT SPOTS

And the meek shall occupy the earth Brazil’s landless peasants are fighting for more than just agrarian reform—their goal is to build a new social order based on solidarity and mutual aid KINTTO LUCAS Uruguayan writer and journalist, currently teaching at Simon Bolivar University in Quito, Ecuador

K EYFIGURES , BRAZIL Total population: 168 million (1999) GNP per capita: US$ 4,420 (1999) Agricultural workers as share of total labour force: 17 % (2000) 37 % (1980) Agriculture as share of GDP: 9 % (1999) 11 % (1980) Sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank.

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red banner flutters at the entrance to the August 8 camp, a town of black tent-houses and narrow alleys located eight kilometres from Bagé and 120 kms from the border with Uruguay, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It features two peasants striding forth from a green map of Brazil and the words “Landless Workers’ Movement.” Founded in the 1980s in southern Brazil to fight for agrarian reform and land redistribution, the Sem Terra movement operates in an unusual but effective way: peaceful occupation of under-used land belonging to transnational companies and big landowners. Brazil has plenty of such land. After neighbouring Paraguay, it has the world’s highest concentration of land ownership.About one percent of landowners are thought to possess 46 percent of the land, while 90 percent have less than 20 percent. According to the National Institute for Land Settlement and Reform (INCRA), the state body in charge of agrarian reform, there are some 100 million hectares of idle land that could be farmed. In the last 20 years, five million peasants and their families have fled the countryside, largely because of this unequal land distribution, and proceeded to swell the ranks of the unemployed in already overcrowded cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It’s an hour after dawn. Clouds and rain are giving way to the sun, which finally emerges. A strong wind whips through the streets of the little town, although a nearby thicket of eucalyptus trees affords some protection.On one side of the tents, men and women wash clothes in a stream. The different teams in the camp are starting their daily chores: some look for firewood, the only fuel available, others cook food and clean,while others meet to discuss the next steps in the fight for land. Eight hundred farming families live in the town’s 200 various-sized dwellings made of wooden frames and black nylon walls and roofs. On both sides, behind wire fences, are 2,700 hectares of idle land belonging to the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. By the fire, while the chimarrão1 of tea is passed around, César, the leader of the camp,

and Gilberto, his deputy, talk about the occupation of the São Pedro estate a few kilometres away. It began at 9pm when more than 3,000 people set out for the estate.When they reached the entrance, soldiers opened fire from a car. Realizing the size of the advancing crowd, the troops retreated to the safety of a building and continued firing. The peasants surrounded the house and pleaded with them to stop. One marcher was killed and two wounded. An hour later, the landowners and the soldiers surrendered and São Pedro was occupied. “We stayed there for a few days,” says Gilberto, “but then we decided to leave because the government promised to give land to all the families within 10 days.”

When black-tented camps grow into agro-towns A few months later, the families still had no land, so new protests were mounted including a 450-km march to Porto Alegre, the state capital, and further occupations. More than 30 children and adults died during the struggle. Today, nine years later, most of the families from the August 8 camp have received land, but across Brazil there are hundreds more black-tented camps. Since 1984, landless peasants in Brazil have occupied more than 3,900 estates and their campaign has become one of the largest protest movements in Latin America.After each occupation, they ask the government to expropriate and redistribute the land—as required by the 1988 Constitution—and when the state does their bidding,the camp turns into a settlement with more permanent structures.About 22 million hectares are thought to have been handed over in this way to 618,000 families, many of whom eat what they grow and sell what is left over through a network of cooperatives. The 8,000 settlements scattered through 24 of Brazil’s 27 states are not just rice, bean and potato plantations. There are kindergartens, schools and clinics, meeting halls and churches. The most developed, called “agro-towns,” boast farm industries providing steady jobs for peasants and their families.As in other “mini-societies,” teams of farmers are placed in charge of essential tasks such as planning, food supply, hut-building, internal and January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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T H E N E W P E A S A N T S ’ R E V O LT

Sowing the seeds for a new society at an occupied estate in northeastern Brazil.

external security, firewood,hygiene, religion,leisure, education and sport. “Our battle isn’t just to get land,” says economist João Pedro Stédile, the movement’s national coordinator. “We’re building a new way of life, socially, culturally and politically. Land is just a stepping stone towards this new society, and each occupation is a chance to start building our future.” The movement, he says, “is changing the life of peasants who were once marginalized and had no future. Today, they are working the land with dignity and earning each month about the equivalent of three times the minimum wage, which is more than the average person living in the countryside.”

Fierce resistance from the country’s big landowners During the first government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-98), agrarian reform was presented as vital for the growth of family farming, a solution to food shortages and the way to reduce rural conflict.But Stédile argues that the new policy followed the agricultural development model promulgated by previous military regimes. “That economically-driven policy failed to recognize the importance and potential of smallscale farming in the production process. Family plots are still seen as backward in the capitalist scheme of things. Governments seem to have ignored the fact that over the past 36 years, since

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agrarian reform began under President João Goulart in 1964, rural conflicts have continued and are growing. Over the same period, food production has risen but so has the number of hungry Brazilians.” In Stédile’s opinion, family plots are under siege from a single model of agricultural development that encourages growing cereals (especially soy) for export, and which requires huge investment in transport infrastructure. “Each occupation opens up a new area of political and social formation, of struggle and resistance,” he says.“By occupying land, the peasants are constantly recreating their own history and winning a chance to negotiate.They’re also winning a chance to get a new kind of education for their children in the settlement and the right to a bigger say in decisions about their future.” The road has been far from easy. As expected, the occupations prompted fierce resistance from the big landowners, who ruthlessly worked to stamp them out—persecuting and physically attacking peasants and their leaders through gunmen and paramilitary forces employed to drive protestors off the land.According to the Catholic Church’s Land Commission, which backs the Sem Terra movement, 1,169 violent deaths have occurred in rural Brazil since 1985, including those of trade unionists, peasants, lawyers and priests. Only 16 culprits have been tried and jailed.

It is now widely accepted that food security for local communities means the capacity to access, develop and exchange seeds and to produce enough food for the households, only selling the surplus to the markets. Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmentalist (1940-)

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Specialists in various fields gather together and observe a stalk of rice. The insect disease specialist sees only insect damage, the specialist in plant nutrition considers only the plant’s vigour. It is time to change this approach. Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese promoter of organic agriculture (1913-)

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In an effort to end these conflicts, Henrique Cardoso decided during his second term to ban the expropriation of occupied estates. Stédile views this as contradictory.“The government wanted the landless to stop occupying the estates by warning them that occupied land would not be expropriated, but the fact is that land is only handed over after occupation and struggle.” Violence against peasants has diminished in recent years though Brazil is still lumbered with the problem of how to redistribute its surfeit of

land. The landless have opened up a breach and have won property to farm alongside rewards such as the Alternative Nobel Prize2. Despite this, the current minister of agricultural development,Raul Jungmann, recently suggested that the Sem Terra has strayed. “I think it’s important to have mediators leading the protestors. But the landless movement no longer plays this role. It hasn’t been able to adapt to changes in the world and to agrarian issues in Brazil.” The minister pointed out that since he took office in 1996, the average annual number of newly settled families has grown tenfold.The government’s action,he stated,has two clear objectives: “reduce the number of conflicts in the countryside and make land reform more efficient.” The movement contests this analysis and remains well aware that the future of their struggle will largely depend on not forgetting its original aims. ■ 1. A metal recipient used by Brazilian peasants to drink a local blend of herbal tea. 2. Created in 1980 and given on the eve of the Nobel Prizes in the Swedish Parliament to reward actions in favour of the environment and human rights.

A FINE RECORD ON SCHOOLING o the peasants of the landless movement (MST), agrarian reform is not just about land and capital. It also means giving people the tools to become fullfledged citizens. This is where access to education becomes critical. From the outset, MST leaders have not only striven to teach families in the settlements basic literacy and numeracy skills, but also to develop the political awareness necessary to take a critical look at their lives. Agrarian reform, social justice and the class struggle are some of the topics teachers commonly deal with, as well as encouraging discussion of everyday living conditions. The MST believes an organization can only survive if it trains its own leaders, so it has set up several schools for this purpose and a college (Iterra) to train agronomists. There is also a medical brigade trained at Cuba’s International School of Medicine, and eight university teachers have been contracted to train MST officials.

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Primary and secondary education are also given pride of place: the movement has opened about 1,000 schools on occupied land since the mid-1980s, in which some 2,000 teachers give classes to 70,000 pupils. To reduce truancy and combat illiteracy, the MST decided early on to adapt the schools to the agricultural calendar. The school year, which had always started in February or March, no longer clashes with local sowing and harvest times in the rainy season between January and May. This tripled the number of pupils in rural areas and halved illiteracy and the dropout rate in many schools. The Brazilian government acknowledged the success of this approach and decided to follow suit in its own public schools. The new school model involves adapting education to rural conditions and respecting local cultural values such as harmonious relations with nature, a spirit of solidarity, a particular perception of time, along with people’s close bond to the land and their need to defend it. ■

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2. HOT SPOTS

Poverty amidst plenty: the Punjabi tale The Green Revolution might have enriched Punjab, but it is sounding a deathknell for small farmers driven to bankruptcy by debts and barren land KUMKUM DASGUPTA Journalist based in New Delhi, working for DOWN TO EARTH, an environment and science biweekly

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s the sun sets on the sepia-coloured horizon,Ram Pal sits alone to tell his story. “Let the land open wide and swallow us up. My nine acres have become unproductive due to water logging.The fields are full of wild grass.I have a family of three to feed and a debt of $1,100 to repay,” laments the 60-year-old farmer from Kalalwala village in Punjab’s Bhatinda district. Now Ram Pal goes to the nearby town every day to work as a labourer. Like many farmers, he has been caught in the vortex of Punjab’s agricultural crisis. Today, many farmers living in one of India’s richest granaries are in danger of losing their livelihood as agricultural lands are slowly turning barren due to farming practices aimed at increasing yields to meet demand. Forty years ago, the state embarked on an agrarian revolution, popularly known as the Green Revolution (GR), designed to improve harvests. It was born out of a dire necessity to provide food security for the country and reduce dependence on imports from the West, which reached 10 million tonnes in 1967.As a result of the GR,agricultural productivity in Punjab grew by around six percent annually for the next two decades. By the mid1980s, wheat and rice yields had trebled.

Rising costs as farmers step up reliance on chemical fertilizers Undoubtedly, the GR made Punjab—where 70 percent of the labour force works in agriculture and related activities—one of the richest states in India. Yearly per capita income (at current prices) rose from $60 in 1980-81 to $440 in 1997-98, well above the national $240 average. But there is a flip side to this prosperity. Always seeking to boost production, farmers made excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides,altered crop patterns and overexploited groundwater resources. Warning bells were sounded early on by M.S. Swaminathan (see p. 36), the eminent scientist who masterminded the GR. “Irrigation without arrangements for drainage could result in soils getting alkaline or saline.Indiscriminate use of pesticides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in the biological balance,” he warned the Indian Science Congress in 1968. But the warning was not heeded.The soils have been ravaged, central districts have depleted water tables while others are waterlogged because of poor

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drainage systems and heavy monsoons. Though there have been no official reports indicating mass rural exodus or decline in overall food yield in the state, recent studies have revealed that the growth rate in productivity has declined in most areas. “The GR was a reductionist strategy, not a total strategy,” says Pramod Kumar,director of the Punjabi-based Institute for Development and Communication. “It was more a grain revolution than a green revolution. Its unsustainable policies have led to the poverty of soil and the people.I call it the poverty of prosperity.” According to an official report, dependence on chemical fertilizers, which increased from 5,000 tonnes in 1960-61 to 1.3 million in 1998-99, has led to severe micronutrient deficiency in the soil. Furthermore, in the absence of adequate organic matter, soil organisms such as bacteria, fungi and earthworms have been reduced in number or lost altogether, notes the study. “Since the soil has lost its natural capacity to nourish the crops, we have to keep on adding fertilizers. Naturally, the cost of production is going up,” says Jitender Pal Singh, a farmer in Ropar district.The cost of producing one tonne of wheat rose from $30 in 1984-85 to $80 in 1997-98, almost a three fold increase in 12 years. Simultaneously, the shift from water-prudent

Chandigarh Ludhiana P U N J A B NEW DELHI I N D I A

Too much of a good thing: irrigation in central Punjab.

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2. HOT SPOTS crops like maize and pulses to wheat and rice cultivation led to increased demand for groundwater. “Farmers sow paddy [rice] in the summer month of May to meet a September 1 deadline set by the government to procure paddy at a pre-fixed price.But during the summer, crops need excess water, which upsets the water table,” says S.P. Mittal, principal scientist at the Central Soil and Water Conservation Research Centre in Chandigarh, the Punjabi capital. Because of over-extraction, the water table has declined by one to three metres in more than 75 percent of the state. At the same time, poor drainage systems and the monsoons have led to waterlogging in the fields. A 1999 report estimates that agricultural lands equivalent to a 2,350-square kilometre area in Punjab have been affected. Once a field is waterlogged, farmers have no other choice but to stop cultivation. Many are forced to migrate to nearby towns for odd jobs or wait for government help until the land regains its fertility several years later. An estimated 1.5 million hectares of land already face various types of soil degradation. If this

trend continues, average yields per hectare are expected to decrease, while reliance on fertilizers will continue to push up production costs. The situation is a deathknell for small farmers, who own more than half of Punjab’s 1.2 million farms. Ecological devastation and socio-economic problems go hand in hand. Studies reveal that a majority of farmers in Punjab take out short-term loans at high interest rates to continue production.A 1999 Punjab University study found that indebtedness among farmers has pushed up suicides fourfold in ten years, while the rate in the rest of the country is declining. As the state’s agricultural crisis worsens, solutions have been put forward.One of the most urgent steps is to explore how certain regions could be desalinated,says the noted scientist S.K.Sinha, of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He also advocates policies that would give farmers the incentive to shift to organic farming, cultivate integrated soil healthcare systems involving the use of green manure and reduce dependence on water-consuming crops. ■

Bangladesh: the seeds of change A burgeoning movement is proving that organic farming is not only economically viable, but a route to better health and control over seeds and genetic resources KAMAL MOSTAFA MAJUMDER Journalist based in Dhaka

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here was a time when Mohammad Reazuddin’s paddies were being attacked I N D I A by pests and his yields declining, despite generous use of pesticides and fertilizers.No longer. BANGLADESH These products are a thing of the past Tangail and his harvests have improved.This 60DHAKA Pabna year-old father of seven, who lives in Tangail district northwest of Dhaka,has Noakhili renewed confidence in the future. Reazuddin is one of some 25,000 farmers around Bangladesh who have Cox’sBazar joined the Nayakrishi Andolan movement.Created to help farmers after the devastating floods of September ● Robin Mason. 1 9 9 8 ,the movement not only advocates an alternative Globalising Education: method of farming—without pesticides or chemicals— Trends and but also a more community-based approach that draws on both traditional knowledge and scientific innovations. “We insist that agriculture is not a factory or an industry,” says Farhad Mazhar, a coordinator of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives), the NGO that spearheaded the movement. “Agriculture is a way of life, a cultural practice. Our movement is about cultivating a happier relationship with nature.” For UBINIG, the extensive damage to crops caused by the 1988 flood prompted a deeper B H U T A N

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exploration of the agricultural crisis. In the early 1990s, the group carried out extensive research into the impact of modern agriculture, introduced thirty years earlier in Asia by the Green Revolution through a package of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, high-yielding seed varieties and irrigation water. Their study pointed to declining soil fertility, a steady increase in the use of fertilizers and a range of health and nutrition problems.A decline in the quantity and diversity of local fish populations was also reported, while high-yielding rice varieties were failing to produce the biomass needed to feed livestock.

The art of making good compost and rotating crops It is this whole ecological chain that Nayakrishi Andolon is gradually trying to repair. Joining the movement means adhering to a set of principles that range from spurning pesticides, introducing mixed cropping and crop rotation for soil fertility to preserving seeds and genetic resources in farmers’ hands.Winning adepts, however,has not always been easy. “At the beginning, when workers from the UBINIG told us to grow crops without chemicals, we thought they were crazy,” recalls Rekha Begum, from Kandapara village. “They told us we could make the soil fertile by using compost and taught us how to prepare it in just over a month. Even though the yield was a little below what others obtained by using chemicals, when we calculated the cost of the inputs, we discovered we had more profit,” she says. From the start, the movement drew the poorest of the country’s farmers, those with less than one January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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quarter of a hectare of land who were desperate for an alternative working method.Today,they make up 75 percent of its followers. They are the ones who have been forced to sell land because they could no longer afford the rising price of fertilizers and pesticides. Rather than showing them model farms, UBINIG works directly with farmers in their fields along with running training programmes and meetings in project areas.

Scientists and peasants: a fruitful alliance Farmers have learnt to improve soil quality by reintroducing natural nutrients such as composts made with water hyacinth. Sugarcane yields have increased thanks to the cultivation of nitrogenfixing crops like lentils and beans. Besides rice, they have started to grow varieties of pulses,oil seeds and cereals that were once part of the daily diet. Indigenous paddy varieties have reappeared along with uncultivated crops such as creepers, which account for up to 40 percent of food supply in some areas. More fish varieties have resurfaced and production has improved, giving families greater food security. According to a study by the UN Development Programme (U NDP), livestock population has increased by 100 to 200 percent and cash income by 50 to 200 percent since Nayakrishi practices were introduced. Mixed cropping was found to be three times more productive than monocultures. Control over seeds is a lifeline for farming communities. Nayakrishi farmers are willing to use “high-yield” varieties if they can collect and preserve the seeds. Crop seeds are stored in community centres located in every village. Farmers obtain them free of cost at the time of sowing and must

return twice the amount unless their harvest is poor. These community-run centres, an insurance against damage to seedlings in case of bad weather, have created strong bonds between farmers. Women, with their knowledge of seed preservation and germination, play a guiding role in running the centres. And biodiversity is flourishing: a central Seed Wealth Centre counts an astonishing collection:1,036 varieties of 356 species of cereals, vegetables, fruits, trees, creepers and shrubs. Against all odds, and with little national support, farmers with slightly more land are starting to acknowledge the economic viability of organic farming.The practices are being adopted by smaller NGOs around the country while a network is being set up in Nepal,India and Pakistan. “A significant achievement lies in the links that have been forged with agricultural scientists.The Nayakrishi practice has been able to provoke critical reflection in mainstream agricultural thought,” states the UNDP. Furthermore, as the word on Nayakrishi spreads, organic products are gaining a reputation for being more nutritious and have started to earn higher prices in local markets. Every year visitors flock to a fair to get first-hand information about the movement.According to UNDP,“the most important impact, apart from the ecological gains, has been to engender confidence among the farming communities.” UBINIG ’s coordinator Farhad Mazhar is calling for more government involvement to boost the movement, arguing that it can benefit local families while also having major repercussions abroad. “Bangladesh is economically poor but ecologically very rich,” he asserts, before claiming with unbridled conviction: “If we can conserve and develop this ecological wealth, we could feed Europe.” ■

Oefforts to radically transform the KEY FIGURES, BANGLADESH Total population : 127 million (1999) GNP per capita: US$ 370 (1999) Agricultural workers as share of total labour force: 56 % (2000) 73 % (1980) Agriculture as share of GDP: 21 % (1999) 50 % (1980) Sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank.

TO KNOW MORE ● Robin Mason. Globalising Education: Trends and Applications. Routledge, 1998

TO KNOW MORE ● Robin Mason. Globalising Education: Trends and Applications. Routledge, 1998

Bigger and better:organic aubergines go to market in Bangladesh.

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2. HOT SPOTS

“GMOs: the wrong answer to the wrong problem” At the head of the influential Peasant Movement of the Philippines, rice farmer Rafael Mariano explains why people from across the region are on the march against pesticides and genetically modified seeds INTERVIEW BY MICHEL BESSIÈRES UNESCO COURIER journalist

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an you briefly describe the situation of agriculture in the Philippines? Agriculture is still the cornerstone of the Philippine economy: it employs 40 percent of the active population (11.6 million in 1999). A majority of farmers use only simple tools and draught animals. Most farms are very small:only 2.1 hectares on average. Landlessness is a major problem:seven out of ten farmers do not own the land they till.They are bound by feudal and semi-feudal relations of exploitation as tenants,farm workers or lease-holders.A few families control vast tracts of land: 60 percent of the agricultural lands are in the hands of 13 percent of the landowners.The biggest landlords own more than 20 percent of all agricultural land.

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Is your country self-reliant in food? Since colonization, Philippine agriculture has been export-oriented, and this is one of its weaknesses. From 1995 to 1999, it exported 8.25 million tonnes of banana, pineapple and mango, but had to import 4.74 million tonnes of rice and 1.18 million tonnes of corn. Our country doesn’t have basic industries. Therefore agriculture has to import most farm inputs, tools and machines. Nine out of 13 big pesticide companies in the Philippines are foreign. They control 85 percent of the market. Companies like Nestlé, Dole and Del Monte dominate the processing and trade of food and agricultural products. Some of them also engage in agricultural production and own or control vast tracts of land. How has the situation evolved since the World Trade Organization came into being in 1995? January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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???????? T? H? E ?N ?E W : ?P?E?A?S?A?N?T?S?’ ?R?E?V?O?LT ?

The Philippines has gone through a spectacular shift from food exporter to food importer.In the first five years after the Agriculture Agreement came into effect in January 1995,the Philippines incurred a total agricultural trade deficit of $3.5 billion in contrast to a $1.69 billion surplus in the previous five-year period. Rice is not only the country’s most important crop,providing a source of income to 3.2 million rice farmers, it also provides 35 percent of the average Filipino diet. Yet, rice imports peaked at 2.2 million tonnes in 1998, more than a quarter of local consumption. Unstable prices can lead to large and abrupt swings in purchasing power for poor consumers.Such uncertainty contradicts the notion of food security. How does the use of agrochemicals affect Filipino farmers? It started with the Green Revolution in the 70s which farmers were almost forced to join as the use of “high yielding varieties” was then part and parcel of the bogus land reform programme of the Marcos dictatorship. I remember that before we always brought something home from our farms even between harvesting seasons. There were mudfish,snails and frogs. In this respect,our farms were much more productive then. It was only after the introduction of the so-called miracle rice that we started to incur debts because we always had to buy new pesticides every time there was a new pest ravaging the fields. Because of their debts, many farmers were driven from their land. It is often argued that GMOs are the only way to boost food production and meet the demand of a rising population.Why do you refute this? GMOs are the wrong answer to the wrong problem.The problem is not that there is not enough food, but that too many people have no access to adequate food. Four out of five hungry people live in countries that are exporting food, while Europe and North America are facing a food surplus problem. That is why they want to break open the markets of poor countries for their agricultural products. Besides, GMOs will increase the stranglehold of transnational corporations. The top five agrochemical companies also dominate the transgenic seed business.They will dictate the terms. The farmers will be at the losing end. So what’s the use of increasing yields when you’re pushing millions of small farmers deeper into perennial poverty? And then there’s the question of whether GMOs will actually increase productivity. I doubt it. Farms that produce an adequate and diversified food supply for the local market are much more productive than those that produce only one crop destined for cities or export. Is organic farming an alternative, and is KMP involved in any such experiments? KMP is first and foremost a campaign centre.We encourage members to engage in organic farming and to develop alternatives to destructive chemicalintensive farming. We maintain close ties with a range of Philippine NGOs that are experts in that

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THE PEOPLE’S CARAVAN uring the 70s, when the country was under martial law, farmers formed clandestine organizations that came into the open in the early 80s and started to launch mass campaigns. KMP (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas) a national federation of militant peasant organizations, was officially founded in 1985. It counts 55 provincial chapters and an estimated membership of 800,000 poor and landless farmers. One of the most powerful organizations of its kind in Asia, KMP is a member of the international Via Campesina farmers’ movement. It has been involved in several international campaigns focusing on agro-chemical corporations and GMOs. From November 13 to 30 2000, it joined the “The People’s Caravan–Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons,” a march comprising thousands of farmers, landless peasants and anti-GMO advocates which travelled through Tamil Nadu (India), Bangladesh and the Philippines. Additionally, partners from Japan, Korea and Indonesia also held events in their respective countries. During each leg, the Caravan staged educational teach-ins on globalization, pesticides and genetic engineering; meetings and debates with local scientists along with food festivals to promote pesticide-free products and celebrate local culinary diversity. It also organized seed exchanges as an alternative to corporate control on seeds. ■

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FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.geocities.com/kmp_ph

field.With one of them, MASIPAG, we are engaged in the conservation, dissemination and development of 154 traditional rice varieties. To be honest, organic farming is still quite marginal in the Philippines because of the influence of agro-chemical corporations. This is why it’s so important to combine actual implementation of organic agriculture with nationwide campaigns. Sooner or later, we will be able to turn the tide. The agriculture of the future will be much more productive and beneficial for people and the environment because it will be developed by the farmers themselves. Has KMP won many battles on the land reform front? Although it’s easy to focus on the problems, we shouldn’t forget the many victories. Thanks to their campaigns, farmers have been able to reduce land rents for instance, curb interest rates on farm capital and increase the wages of farm workers. There have also been cases of heroic resistance to land grabbing.The farmers of Hacienda Looc in the province of Batangas, for instance,were awarded Certificates of Land Ownership Awards by the Department of Agrarian Reform in 1991.Two years later, the governmentcontrolled Asset Privatization Trust sold the same land to a company that wanted to convert it into a tourist spot with a golf course. Although the mighty real estate company Fil-Estate Land Inc. and local politicians are applying every possible tactic to drive the farmers away, they are still there. Hacienda Looc has become a symbol of peasant pride and resistance to landlords and big business.

KEYFIGURES , PHILIPPINES Total population: 74 million (1999) GNP per capita: US$ 1,020 (1999) Agricultural workers as share of total labour force: 40 % (2000) 52 % (1980) Agriculture as share of GDP: 17 % (1999) 25 % (1980) Sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank.

Sources: Clive James, International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)

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2. HOT SPOTS

France: mad cows and studious farmers Farmers, environmentalists and consumers unite to battle the ravages of industrial farming in Brittany MICHEL BESSIÈRES UNESCO COURIER jounalist

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KEY FIGURES, INDIA KEYFIGURES , FRANCE Total population: 59 million (1999) GNP per capita: US$ 23,480 (1999) Agricultural workers as share of total labour force: 3.3% (2000) 8.3 % (1980) Agriculture as share of GDP: 2.3 % (1999) 4 % (1980) Sources: UNFood and Agriculture Organization, World Bank.

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hat’s in Brittany? Three million inhabitants, 57,000 farms and 22 million livestock animals, including cows fed on animal meal, pigs enclosed in concrete pens by the hundreds and industrially produced chickens that have never seen the light of day. To catch up economically with the rest of the country and to provide jobs for its children, half a century ago this region in western France adopted the only option it was offered: production-intensive agriculture. Each time there’s a hitch in the system, Brittany suffers. First there were cyclical pig crises, now there’s madcow disease. But not everybody has lost hope. Standing in a field of clover amidst his 35 cows, Pascal Hillion believes he’ll make it through the epidemic.His secret: his placid herbivores have always grazed on grass instead of eating granules containing animal meal, which causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). “In 1996, about twenty breeders, including myself, created a label for our products, ‘From Brittanny’s Pastures,’ which has helped us to win back consumers’ trust and to show other breeders how to proceed. We don’t use nitrate fertilizers, so our method respects the environment,” he says. “We produce better-quality meat while spending less, working less and earning a better living.Ten years ago, people thought we were eccentric. Today, young people who want to become farmers are studying us closely.” The 20 partners have even opened up a butcher’s shop in Saint-Brieuc. This initiative will not revolutionize farming in Brittany, but similar experiments are multiplying thanks to a network of organizations. Seventy of them, grouped together under the name “Cohérence,” are trying to forge a new alliance between farmers, environmentalists and consumers. Everybody in the town of Lorient knows Dr. Lylian Le Goff. Responding to a student council request, he put organic food on the university restaurant’s menu, demonstrating that natural products are not necessarily more expensive than others. A nearby highschool has already followed suit. And many local communities, after banning beef from school cafeterias, wonder whether this might be the answer to their worries.“Productionintensive farming claims to supply inexpensive food,” says the doctor, who is also president of

Cohérence. “That would be true if, after coming home from the supermarket, we didn’t have to pay taxes for the European Union’s common agricultural policy, which amounts to 3,000 French francs [about $400] per European household, finance exceptional subsidies to offset periodic drops in pork prices and,above all,foot the water pollution clean-up bill.” Brittany is no stranger to agricultural crises. Each time one has arisen,the region has struggled to overcome it as best it could, but the nagging problem of water pollution is getting worse. Harmful nitrates from the 500 kilos of fertilizers per hectare that farmers spread on their crops, or from foulsmelling manure, are building up in rivers. For Brittany, that represents a toxic waste spill of 200,000 tonnes a day. In theory, France abides by the polluter-pays principle. But since the first water pollution law was passed in 1964, powerful agricultural industry pressure groups have made sure that it has never been enforced.

Marching for quality water and a different kind of agriculture As early as 1969, Eaux et Rivières de Bretagne, an organization of salmon-fishers and nature-lovers, sounded the alarm. Since then, the group has voiced the discontent of its members, who have won a lawsuit against the Lyonnaise des Eaux water company:they deduct the pollution clean-up charges from their bills.“On March 21, 1999,” says livestockbreeder and Cohérence member Denis Baulier, “8,000 people demonstrated in Pontivy, in the centre of Brittany, demanding both quality water and a different kind of agriculture. That is the day when consumers and farmers joined forces.” As attitudes were changing, the condition of rivers was deteriorating. The government launched a pure water plan for Brittany in 1990,followed by another one. Ten years and 1.5 billion francs later, the amount of nitrates is higher than ever. The government has even opened a second front by implementing a plan to control agricultural pollution. A recent government accounting office report has blasted the scheme for abysmal management. “That plan has already cost five billion francs,” says René Louail, a livestock-breeder from the Côtes d’Armor region and spokesman for the Confédération paysanne, a farmers’ group. “For the most part,it’s been used to approve or legitimate farms that have gone around the law to expand. There won’t be any significant improvement of January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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T H E N E W P E A S A N T S ’ R E V O LT

Brittany’s water until more ecological farming methods are adopted.” André Pochon agrees. “Farming in Brittany started spinning out of control when the bond with the soil was broken,” he says. Dédé, as everybody calls him, has had time to think the matter over. In 1944, when he was 11 years old, a teacher convinced his parents to put him into an accelerated programme. Two years later he graduated and was encouraged to enroll in a teachers’ training college. But he preferred cows and the Jeunesse agricole

being imposed to feed cattle. “It’s a monumental mistake except for agro-business! Farmers have to buy their hybrid seeds and herbicides, purchase farm equipment and buildings for intensive breeding, level their knolls, drain wet land, etc. The cost is sky-high and the consequences for the environment are serious. If you leave the soil bare in the winter, the corn actually increases nitrate run-off.” In the early days of the common agricultural policy, Europe negotiated its place as a food and agricultural power with the United States. It obtained

The only miracle that seems to have been achieved with the breeding strategy of the Green Revolution is the creation of new pests and diseases and, with them, the ever-increasing demand for pesticides. Vandana Shiva, Indian scientist (1952-)

Taking over the streets in central Brittany, where residents don’t dare drink from the tap.

chrétienne,a Christian farmers’ youth group that was a breeding ground for the trade union cadres who were going to revolutionize Brittany’s agriculture. “We did a terrific job up to 1970. We boosted our yield threefold while keeping the same number of farms.At that time, we sold butter and cheese.We let cows roam freely in the meadows and raised pigs on whey. But when industrialists introduced milk collection, intensive pig-breeding started and with it, the elimination of small farms and the race to increase yields.” Dédé went along with the trend, but also took correspondence courses and read a lot.“I became an agronomist in spite of myself,” he says. He also perfected his method of combining grass with clover to fix nitrogen in the soil.As a result,he pursued and improved the fodder revolution that had been under way for several decades. He also convinced other farmers around him. A master of the one-liner, he says, “A cow is a mower in front and a manurespreader in the rear.There’s no need for cutting the grass or for mineral fertilizers.”Today, his method has caught on with hundreds of livestock-breeders in Brittany, like Pascal Hillion. But when André Pochon started using it, the corn-soybean combination was

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a green light, except in one area: animal feed. To protect its farmers, the United States had to export their soy. Today, France imports over four million tonnes of soybeans, a good proportion of which is genetically modified.André Pochon has been making the same arguments for 25 years. At first, ecologists listened to him. Then organizations did. “I help them evolve and they’ve changed my perception. Together, we’ve changed people’s mentalities.” Sustainable agriculture labels are flourishing for all farm products. In Brittany, people would like to be able to drink tap water again. Since the mad cow crisis broke out, local communities have been seeking more reliable meat supplies.And the public is shaken. But people are starting to assess the stakes,and know that farmers can adapt.They also know that it’s everybody’s business to decide whether to change with or against nature. ■

Source: UNFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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2. HOT SPOTS

Rage against the exodus: the crisis in China’s land reform Punitive tax rates and falling revenues have combined to drive around 100 million Chinese peasants to the towns even as the spirit of protest sweeps through the countryside ANNE LOUSSOUARN Beijing-based journalist

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he village of Yuandu,70 kilometres from the provincial capital of Nanchang, seems a quiet enough place. Elderly peasants in Total population : threadbare Mao tunics lead their oxen 1.2 billion (1999) through the streets.Women attend to the GNP per capita : stalks of rice they have scattered over the road so the US$ 780 (1999) occasional passage of a vehicle can help separate the grain from the chaff. Agricultural workers as share of total labour force: The harvest is over. Everyone is preparing for a 67 % (2000) quiet winter,or going off to work for a few months in 74 % (1980) Nanchang, a nearby town, or for their wealthy Agriculture as share of GDP: neighbours in Fujian, Zhejiang or Guangdong 17 % (1999) provinces. Just a few months ago on August 17, 30 % (1980) however, the people of Yuandu, joined days later Sources: UN Food and Agriculture by the inhabitants of nearby villages, staged violent Organization, World Bank. demonstrations. “There are 300 officials in this village and we only need 30,” shouts a woman in her 50s as she does her laundry in a murky-looking pond. “We have to get rid of this huge burden.” She tills five mu (a third of a hectare) of land—quite a big plot given that the average population density in rural China is nearly 700 people per square kilometre. She eats most of what she grows. Chinese peasants only sell 20 to 30 per cent of their yield. What she sells earns Shanghai her about 3,000 yuan (less than $300). But she has to pay more than $100 in Nanchang land tax, a smaller amount for fertilizer and pesticide and about $30 to a fund J I A N X I for irrigation. Her annual net income as a result comes to a little over $40. Not enough to pay for her children’s Hong Kong G UA N G X I schooling and certainly not enough to buy meat, which she only eats three times South China Sea a year.“I borrow money from my sisters who are laundresses in a hotel in Nanchang,” she says. The youngsters have already left the village.“A lot of people are trying to get rid of their land,”says one old man. “But who’s going to want it?” The small rural factories,which have a hard time competing with those in towns or abroad, are a shadow of what they once were.“They can’t even pay their workers’ wages,” says a driver in the next town,Fengcheng.“Mostly it’s just the managers who get paid.” This over-taxing of the peasantry is seen as the direct result of pressure on the local authorities to exceed, sometimes by a big margin, the tax ceiling of five percent set by Beijing. In a letter in the newspaper Nanfang Zhumo, Li Changping,the party

KEY FIGURES, CHINA

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secretary of Qipan village in Hubei, says 80 percent of peasants have gone into debt to pay their taxes. But the local authorities have no alternative if they are to make up the deficit in their budgets, which are increasing by between 100,000 to 150,000 yuan (roughly $15,243) a year.The local bureaucracy has nearly tripled from 120 to 340 people in the past 10 years. The new leaders admit they cannot stand up to the pressure of friends and family and have no choice but to give them jobs as officials. Furthermore,the costs of economic development and running the village—including the maintenance of infrastructure and irrigation, subsidies for schools, support for local industry, upkeep of local militias, not to mention embezzlement by bureaucrats, which is constantly being denounced by press and party leaders alike—have rocketed since the early 1990s. Though heavy taxation triggered the unrest, villagers’ discontent can be traced back to the economic stagnation of the past decade, which followed on from the euphoria that greeted the end of collective farming in the 1980s.

A short-lasted burst of prosperity Land is still collectively owned, but leased to families for 30-year periods. In exchange, the peasants must hand over a fixed part of their production to the state at set prices before being able to sell the rest on the free market. Since this gives peasants more of a stake in the system, perhectare cereal production shot up by over 50 percent between 1975 and 1985,according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Meanwhile, the number of people working on the land has dropped sharply, boosting production by nearly 20 percent a year at village factories set up in the wake of decollectivization to employ surplus labour. Nearly 120 million people work in these factories today. Estimates suggest that around 50 to 60 million peasants left the land at the end of the 1980s to look for better paid work in the towns, mainly in construction, restaurants and domestic service. Even in those jobs, an urban standard of living is still higher than the hard life in the countryside and better reflects the aspirations of modern Chinese youth. For the villagers who stayed behind, these far-reaching changes led to quite unexpected profits and a sudden burst of prosperity. But productivity gains also led to overproduction, which set off a disastrous price collapse January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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???????? T? H? E ?N?E W : ?P?E?A?S?A?N?T?S?’ ?R?E?V? O?LT ?

at the very same instant that the cost of farm supplies, including fertilizers and pesticides, was steadily rising (at nearly 15 percent a year between 1984 and 1996). Families were thus trapped between rising tax demands and stagnant incomes, or even, according to some Chinese experts, incomes that have fallen over the past three years. The exodus from the countryside is increasing and now totals between 80 and 100 million men and women. And there is no sign that this rural depopulation is going to stop, even though moving to the towns has been made more difficult through the introduction of the hukou or place of origin system, a kind of internal passport that nails the Chinese to their place of birth.

The oncoming shock of the World Trade Organization Chinese experts believe that the farm crisis stems from an incomplete liberalization, which they note has been less sweeping than in the towns:this would account for very low productivity rates caused by tiny plots of land, a labour force that is still too big and a crippling lack of bank loans needed for capital investment. Cereal production in China, for instance, is currently half what it is in France. All of which adds up to a peasantry stripped of power over their land.“Some local authorities often force the villagers to plant what produces the best tax revenues.But since everybody does the same, the prices collapse within two years and the villager is the loser,” explains Dang Guoying, a researcher at the Academy of Social Sciences. China is about to sign up to the rules governing the global marketplace by joining the World Trade

Organization (WTO).Villagers are mostly unaware of this, but they are almost certain to bear the brunt of the change. How are they going to cope with probable imports of much cheaper farm produce given that some Chinese prices are far above world market levels? In April 1999, for example, Chinese wheat was 44 percent higher, maize 67 percent, rice 26 percent and cotton 17 percent higher, according to official Chinese statistics from 1999. Some experts say China can use its comparative advantage in the long-term by exporting labour-intensive items such as fruit, vegetables and fish. But according to forecasting by the FAO, China’s farming population will still have to fall by 60 million over the coming decade. Will farmers have enough power to cushion the shock? Since 1988, villagers have been able to elect their own committees outside the framework of the party and have thus won the right to a greater say in economic management, whereas industrial workers remain under tighter party control. “What we’re seeing are more discussion groups at the village level,” says Jean-Louis Rocca, an expert on social trends. Another specialist, Liu Yawei, emphasizes that “villagers have learned how to obstruct moves by local officials and take matters up at a higher official level, even by inviting journalists from the well-known national television programme Focus (Jiaodian Fangtan) to come and investigate suspected corruption and blatant injustice.” And no one has forgotten that over the course of China’s 3,000-year history, it was often the nongmin qiyi—peasant uprisings—that toppled the great dynasties. ■

The quarrels of the lords can be read on the backs of the peasants. Russian proverb

TO KNOW MORE ● Robin Mason. Globalising Education: Trends and Applications. Routledge, 1998

TO KNOW MORE ● Robin Mason. Globalising Education: Trends and Applications. Routledge, 1998

The rice harvest in the province of Guizhou won’t cushion the coming blow of lower market prices with China’s entry into the WTO.

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January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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2. HOT SPOTS

Biovillages: a blueprint for the future? The father of India’s Green Revolution—and early critic of its abuse — has a new brainchild: villages where the poor have the means to earn their living and preserve the land M. S. SWAMINATHAN indian agricultural scientist

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he 20th century ended with spectacular achievements in every field of human KEY FIGURES, INDIA endeavour and the spread of democratic Total population: systems of government. It also ended with 998 million (1999) nearly a billion people going to bed partially hungry and with the universal goals of GNP per capita: US$ 450 (1999) “food, health, literacy and work for all” still remaining distant dreams. The uneven progress in Agricultural workers as share of bringing the benefits of modern science and total population: 60 % (2000) technology to the least well-off, particularly in the 69 % (1980) areas of medicine, agriculture, information technology and biotechnology, has led to increasing Agriculture as share of GDP: 28 % (1999) divides between rich and poor in areas that are 38 % (1980) critical to human well-being: demographic Sources: UN Food and distribution, technological and digital access, and AgricultureOrganization, World Bank. economic power. Any objective balance sheet of human achievements during the 20th century thus reveals both “bright” spots in relation to prosperity built on technological innovation, and “hot spots” where poverty, deprivation and gender inequity remain, and in some cases have even worsened. The M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation was established in Chennai [formerly Madras] in India in 1990 with the aim of addressing environmental degradation, I N D E population explosion, poverty and gender NEW DELHI injustice at the micro-level in a few such social “hot spots.” The Foundation’s Chennai mandate is to impart a pro-nature, propoor and pro-women orientation to an Pondicherry economic growth strategy in rural areas— a strategy that above all else focuses on creating jobs. This emphasis stems from the fact that jobless economic growth is joyless growth, and the observation that SRI inadequate purchasing power is the LANKA overriding cause of household food insecurity. The Union Territory of Pondicherry in the state of Tamil Nadu was chosen as the place to start this adventure in empowering women and men mired in poverty with skills, information and access to technology. Such people are poor only because they have no assets—no land, no livestock, no houses and often no education.Their only assets are time and labour. Our challenge was therefore to enhance the economic value of these assets, a goal that could be achieved through a transition from unskilled to skilled work. Asset building and community development have to be the pathways

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for the lasting eradication of poverty. This calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about development from a “do good”approach based on patronage to one of genuine partnership with the poor. Mahatma Gandhi in India was one of the first to deprecate the policy of “poor feeding,” insisting that governments and communities must enable everyone to earn his or her daily bread.

Eco-jobs and micro-credit to boost village income These considerations led to the birth of the biovillage movement in Pondicherry. The term “biovillage” is derived from the Greek word bios, which means living, and our priority was just that: human-centred development. Poverty persists in conditions where human resources are undervalued whereas land and material resources are overvalued. The biovillage model of rural and agricultural development is designed to remedy this imbalance by conserving and enhancing natural resources, eradicating poverty and empowering women. This programme has been in progress in 19 villages in Pondicherry since 1994, covering a population of 24,000 people, though we have plans to extend the scheme to around 375,000 people throughout the region by 2007. One leg of the programme is eco-farming, meaning that chemicals and capital—the building blocks of modern farming—are replaced with knowledge and biological inputs like vermiculture [exploitation of earthworms], bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides; this in turn creates new eco-jobs in villages. The programme’s other leg is the creation of more avenues for rural non-farm employment based on marketing opportunities. New opportunities for earning a living are devised through analyzing a family’s resources.As a result, landless labouring families take to household mushroom cultivation, ornamental fishrearing, coir rope-making, rearing small ruminant animals under stall-fed conditions and other enterprises which are within their means. Those with a small plot of land can take to hybrid seed production, floriculture, dairying, poultry and other high value enterprises. Groups of assetless women engage in aquaculture in community ponds. All these exercises are based on micro-level planning, and enterprises supported by micro-credit. A range of activities helps enhance total income (which has risen on average by $23 per month per January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?T? H? E ?N ?E W : ?P?E?A?S?A?N?T?S?’ ?R?E?V?O?LT ?

????????????????

Oefforts to radically transform the system and replace it with new models, many of which remain undefined and untested.

Practical advice on how to get the most out of the least amount of fertilizer.

capita for villagers) and minimize risks.Education and training, social organization and producer-oriented marketing are all crucial to the programme’s success. Self-help groups operate a community banking system involving low transaction costs and high loan recovery. Most importantly, the biovillage movement is based on inclusion and not exclusion.The local women and men who become trainers are inducted into a Biovillage Corps of Rural Professionals.

An ever-green approach to environmental awareness Most of the nearly 100 members inducted so far are either semi-literate or even illiterate,but they are the prime-movers and doers of the biovillage movement, proving beyond all doubt that the rural poor can take to new technologies like fish to water, provided they are able to learn through practical work experience and not classroom lectures. How can such a biovillage movement spread? With the help of the Pondicherry administration, we propose to convert all 270 villages in the Territory into biovillages, a plan that will require a further $15 million (most of which will come from ongoing programmes for the poor and possibly from the International Fund for Agricultural Development). Several institutional structures have accelerated the pace of change.A Biovillage Council, comprising a male and female member from each village, undertakes strategic planning. A Biocentre serves

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as a single-stop resource centre, providing the necessary inputs, information and training. And lastly, a rural knowledge centre with an Internet connection provides information to families on health, education, entitlements, eco-technologies and marketing. The biovillage model helps bridge all four divides—demographic, digital, economic and technological. It promotes harmony with nature and with each other. It is based on eco-technologies,which are environmentally benign, economically viable and socially equitable. It shows the path to an ever-green revolution in agriculture, where productivity advances can take place without leading to ecological or social harm. The choice of technologies is flexible. And while the concept has certain ground rules, like a “pro-nature,pro-poor and pro-women” orientation to spreading technology and a partnership approach to eradicating poverty, the precise action plans are developed by the villagers in association with professionals.The virtual colleges linking scientists and rural families help to hasten the spread of such symbiotic partnerships. Under UNESCO’s Asian Ecotechnology Network, the biovillage paradigm of sustainable human development is now spreading to other parts of India and to other nations.It has led to the emergence of many new voices and leaders in the villages, who in turn ensure the programme—like the communities it involves—can survive and prosper.

M.S. SWAMINATHAN During his five-decade long career as a scientist,Professor M.S. Swaminathan has won several international awards, including the first World Food Prize in 1987. The head of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (Chennai, India),he holds the UNESCO-Cousteau chair in Ecotechnology and is the author of I predict: A Century of Hope—Harmony with Nature and Freedom from Hunger, East West Books Pvt. Ltd,Chennai,1999.

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January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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◗ E T H I C S

George Washington oversaw the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Yet Americans are still scratching their heads over their electoral system.

Will the College crumble? The debate is only beginning over how the U.S. elects the world’s most powerful leader AMY OTCHET

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UNESCO COURIER journalist

efore laying the U.S. presidential election saga to rest, let’s revisit a favourite bedtime story: The Three Little Pigs, featuring Ralph,Al and Dubya. The scene opens in the Green wilderness where Ralph puts up a tent and lights a campfire as young friends gather to revel in his stories of slain corporate giants.To stoke the excitement, Ralph suddenly cries “Wolf!” In the confusion, he runs to a house nearby where he finds a warm meal and bed. Cunning as a fox, he continues his “Wolf!” cry and crosses the country in style. Enter Al: a serious piggy, who has spent years laying the foundations of his fine home.The problem is that Al invested so much in the bricks and mortar that he overlooked a few details, namely little holes in the ballot-lined roof. So after a

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few weeks of huffing and puffing, the wolf blows his house down to a pile of chads. Finally,Dubya (referring to the middle initial of George W. Bush) and the clan arrive to reclaim an old stomping ground, the Electoral College, a fortress dating back over 200 years, whose framers examined every nook and cranny before sealing it constitutionally (see box). The wolf ferociously attacks, enlisting the majority of voters who throw their weight against the candidate, but the College doesn’t budge. But here’s the twist: the wolf is still scratching at the College—which looks increasingly like a crumbling relic.And his howls are bouncing around the halls of Congress and state legislatures, sending shivers up the spines of politicians now faced with a flurry of petition drives and Internet campaigns by interest groups seeking reform. In fact, there are now three congressional bills to scrap the Electoral College and have voters elect the president and vice president directly1. If

a candidate failed to secure 40 percent of the vote, a run-off election would ensue. Ironically, the most consistent call for reform has come from a Republican, Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois. “It’s a slap in the face to have a select group of elites elect a president a month after the people have cast their votes,” he says. Before turning to politics,LaHood was a highschool teacher in a quandary: he had to instruct students about an electoral system he considered archaic. “I always knew it would take a crisis to provoke a controversy and now we have it,”referring to the bitter disputes over the popular vote for Al Gore. “My own party doesn’t support this… But for me, it’s a matter of principle.” Lahood notes “a huge shift in public support,”especially since high-flying Democrats, like the newly-elected Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, began climbing aboard the bandwagon. A constitutional amendment would 1 As of December 7,2000

E T H I C S ◗

require two-thirds approval in the House of Representatives and the Senate, followed by a majority vote by threequarters of state legislatures. While LaHood foresees hearings in the House this year,he expects small (low-population) states to quash debate in the Senate just as they did to a similar bill in 1969 after Richard Nixon almost lost the presidential election because of the “spoiler”George Wallace, an independent candidate from Alabama with an anti-liberal platform. Just as they did 30 years ago, most small states continue to believe that they have a decisive advantage in the Electoral College. For example, the District of Columbia and the five least populous states have a total of 2.6 million voting-age residents.Together, they had 18 electoral votes in the 2000 election—the same number as Michigan, which has 7.2 million voting-age residents.

senior analyst at the nation’s most respected black think-tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “direct elections would not diminish the minority vote but may enhance it. The minority population does not live in the small states, which have the biggest favourable vote in terms of the Electoral College. A lot of the black and Hispanic populations live in states like Mississippi, Texas,Alabama and the Carolinas where they vote Democrat but the majority votes Republican. So their votes don’t count.” “The small states would get less attention but at least we would have more states getting some attention,” says Harold Gold, an associate professor of government at Smith College in Massachusetts. “This last election was fought in 17 states.The others saw nothing

of the candidates. Under direct elections, there are no safe states.Al Gore could go to Texas [a Republican stronghold] and try to pick up the liberal votes.” But instead of actually visiting those “enemy states” and shaking hands with ordinary folks,candidates would rely upon mass media campaigns, namely through television, according to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a highly respected non-partisan,non-profit research institute.“A giant media campaign would reduce any incentive for a grassroots campaigning and activism,” he says. There is one point of agreement: direct elections would offer a “more” level playing field to third parties.“More” is key—for these new players would still suffer from financial handicaps (parties

Direct elections: a formula for civil war? But let’s imagine—or predict, as many pollsters are already doing—that another razor-thin election in 2004 results in a minority-elected president. Public support could reach fever pitch and America might finally opt for direct elections. Or if the constitutional amendment proves too difficult,the states could follow the path of Maine and Nebraska, which allocate all but two of their electoral votes proportionally instead of a winner-takes-all formula. The remaining two votes are awarded to the statewide winner. How would the “little piggies” then fare in the future? “They will go hunting where the ducks are,” says Judith Best, a political science professor at State University New York at Cortland, who testified at congressional hearings in 1997 about the Electoral College. In direct elections, candidates would focus on winning votes in populous areas—namely the east and west coasts— and ignore the middle of the country.In the race to run up a mathematical majority, they would see no need to build a broad cross-national coalition.“This is a formula for civil war,” she says.To govern such a vast and diverse country, the president must stitch together a campaign based on local and national issues. “If you don’t have a system which forces candidates to reach out to the diverse interests of people, they won’t. Black and Latino influence, for example, would drop like a stone. Blacks represent just 12 percent of the population,” she says, but they currently enjoy leverage “as swing voters in many states.” Best may want to check her arithmetic.According to David Bositis, a

Protestors wave signs and hurl hollowed-out televisions into the Boston Harbor to protest the exclusion of third party presidential candidates from the televised debates

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A recasting of the famous Boston Tea Party when colonists protested against British taxes and control.

must receive five percent of the vote in the previous election to qualify for federal campaign financing). But they might finally break free from the role of the “spoiler,” a nightmare for Ralph Nader’s campaign strategist,Steve Cobble. “Ten days before the elections, the polls predicted that Ralph would receive five to six million votes,” says Cobble. In the end, the vote was so close that he only received about half that, largely because

a vote for Nader was seen as a vote for Bush.“In this country, we firmly believe in the benefits of competition,” adds Cobble,“except in the field of politics. ” Multiple-party systems are seen internationally as a sign of a vibrant democracy. But critics from both the American left and right warn that “healthy competition” could quickly degenerate into hyper-factionalism and the backroom dealing of the Israeli Knesset, which is considered an emblem of instability. “I think there is some middle ground,” says Rob Richie, of the nonprofit Center for Voting and Democracy. The solution lies in obliging the winning candidate to gain 50 percent of the vote, explains Richie, and installing an instant runoff mechanism so that voters could list their first and second choices on the same ballot.“With an instant runoff, there wouldn’t be that nasty edge of one candidate trying to destroy another, which turns off voters. [A candidate like] Nader could implicitly endorse his opponent as a second choice, which is one way of building a more coherent system.”

Relic or remedy? t’s hard not to smirk about the fact that U.S. citizens don’t vote for their president. Instead they vote for a slate of electors who are supposed to cast their ballots for a particular candidate. Every state has as many votes in the Electoral College as the total number of its senators (two) and representatives (based on population) in Congress. If no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses but each state has only one vote. What did the constitutional framers have in mind? It is often assumed that the College arose out of mistrust of the masses. But 200 years ago, the voting population consisted exclusively of an elite group of white men. The framers were looking to break the communications gap:neither media nor political parties existed to spread the word of the candidates. The solution: elect a council of wisemen to keep abreast of the issues and potential presidential candidates. According to John Samples of the libertarian Cato Institute, the framers deliberately sought to complicate the electoral process to ensure that the president would represent local and national constituencies. In this way, they could balance the interests of both small and large states. Yet behind the federal debate lurked the scourge of slavery. According to Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale University law professor, the southern states feared that they would be outnumbered in direct elections because their huge slave populations could not vote. They sought a remedy in a previous compromise in which they won the right to count each slave as three-fifths of a person in determining the number of representatives they could send to Congress. They wanted the same principle applied in the Electoral College. In many ways, “the framers’ argument is irrelevant,” says George C. Edwards III, director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. For example, the framers never even imagined that states would allocate their electoral votes on a “winner-takes-all” basis. More importantly, “One of the clearest trends in American constitutional history has been the expansion of franchise—with amendments to give the right to vote to minorities, women and the residents of the District of Columbia.Since the 1960s, we have become dedicated to the principle of ‘one person, one vote.’ Every elected official is selected that way—except for the president.” ■

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How would third parties compete in the new landscape of direct elections? Would they dynamize the debates? According to Democratic pollster Paul Maslin,“this past election was the supreme example of how the Electoral College sets up a huge fight for the middle.” Demographer Joel Garreau goes a step further. “Both candidates ran as Bill Clinton,which is to say both were willing to do whatever it took in terms of degrading their ideological positions to achieve the centre.”Al Gore, for example, ducked the issue of gun-control to woo voters in the pro-gun swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. George W. Bush raised the ire of the Republican conservative wing by downplaying his anti-abortion position. Under direct elections, it would be more efficient for major party candidates to run up their votes by moving closer to their respective ideological poles, which would leave space in the middle for third parties.

Slipping past the radar of the pollsters “This is one reason,” says Gerry Moan, chairman of the populist Reform party, “why we focus on trade policy and campaign financing. Social issues get you caught in either the left or the right—but the battle will be for the middle.” So much for a new era of vibrant and diverse policy debates that third parties were supposed to introduce… Other than “spoiling” an election, third parties can have the most impact by pushing a main party into a new position, according to Garreau. “If a third party starts to get traction on an issue that the majors didn’t expect, then suddenly those positions become ‘safe’ for mainstream candidates.” But given the sophistication of the demographics industry, can third parties get far with a hot issue before someone like Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, appropriates it? “My radar system is constantly looking at the issues and agendas to incorporate changes as they emerge.” Indeed, Goeas expects the current outrage over the Electoral College to subside after a few Congressional hearings which most Americans will never know took place. But they may be in for a shock in 2004 if another razor-thin election materializes and Republicans face their own “spoiling Nader,” in the form of John McCain. According to many pollsters, the senator from Arizona (who lost the Republican nomination this time round) could have won 25 percent of the vote as an independent candidate. In which case, it may soon be in all parties’ interest to cast their ballots for direct elections. ■

C U L T U R E ◗

A station is a station: a stop in the seaport city of Kaliningrad, in Russia.

Chugging along on Europe’s literary express What happens when one hundred writers spend a month without books on a train, debating in more than 40 languages and stopping along the way to meet the crowds? For one traveller, the Literature Express Europe 2000 did not live up to its dream of cultural dialogue LEO TUOR

O

Romansh writer

ne hundred writers on the same train. Awesome. Unprecedented. The train started in Lisbon and was called the Southern Express until it reached Paris. Then it went to Berlin,Saint Petersburg and Moscow, for which it was rechristened the Northern Express. For the purposes of the entire trip, therefore, it was the NorthSouth Express. A legend comparable to the Orient Express was born. I boarded the train without any preconceptions. It was enough for me to know that in Germany, where the idea was invented, it was called Literaturexpress Europa 2000 and in other countries the Comboio da literatura europa 2000, the Expreso da literatura europa 2000, the Literaturtrena europa

2000 or Literaturas ekspresis eiropa, and so on.A train with many names that all said the same thing but had a different ring each time. In that sense, it was lyrical; what more could poets ask for? And by the way, what would a train like this be like without cellular phones, cameras and other substitutes for male virility? Answer: it would be worthless. Cellular phones, extensively used during the trip by serious-looking passengers,gave the train a distinctive feel.They were to our train what the six-shooter is to the western. At first, there was just a train. Only as time went by did it become our train, for all of us writers, attendants and journalists. Much to my surprise, the journalists were very polite.They belong to our big family. We accepted them and that put them at ease.We didn’t mind the situation, for not only were the questions they asked very different from the common ones,but they

also took a more original approach to photographing us. They were our teammates,in the noble sense of the term. Our train is on the Internet: www.literaturexpress.org. We travelled across Europe at top speed, but our souls did not follow. But we are on the Internet, therefore we are. We represent a vast potential: the European intelligentsia on rails. All of us travelled quietly in the same direction, in first-class. If the train disappeared in Dürrenmatt’s1 tunnel, many books slumbering in our guts and minds would never see the light of day, and many poems would be swallowed up by darkness. Oh, dearest locomotive, whether you look like the mouth of a crocodile, a shark or a laughing cormorant, beware of the Dürrenmatt tunnel! The publishers, who love us the same way that pimps love their January 2001 -The Unesco Courier

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◗ C U L T U R E Born in 1959 in Rabius (Grisons,Switzerland), Leo Tuor is a philosopher, writer and translator in the winter, shepherd and cow-herder in the summer. A great defender of his native language, between 1994 and 1999 he published a critical edition of six volumes of works by the Rhaeto-Romanic poet and historian Giacun Hasper Muoth (published by Octopus in Chur). His last book published in French was Giacumbert Nau, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme,

prostitutes, would never forgive you your trespasses. The women and men of letters were received by the former French prime minister and deputy mayor of the city of Bordeaux,Alain Juppé, who invited us to attend a reception held in our honour at city hall. He did not show up and sent a delegate to read his speech, which was probably drafted by his secretary. After the first three sentences, translation into English and German began, which slowed the process down considerably, though the more the sentences were put through the translation mill, the shorter they became. To be honest, they should have been translated ad absurdum, until the machine ground up all our languages.Then the last language should have been translated into French, which would have given us a completely new text. That is how money gets laundered in my country I tell myself. Bordeaux is the city of the three Ms. If that brings to mind McDonald’s, the symbol of the Mercure hotel chain or, if you are familiar with Switzerland, the MigrosMarkt logo, your way of thinking is most definitely down-to-earth. For

Bordeaux is in fact the city of the writers Montaigne, Montesquieu and Mauriac.

Question: “What do you think of the train?” the journalists ask. We asked each other the same thing. This idea is already a reality for us. For the sake of literature we have already embarked on an adventure that no longer has anything to do with literature. The train is nothing more than an outlandish event, by dint of which it is also a classic short story, like a slight earthquake in Chile, the monster of Kaliningrad or God knows what else. On top of which, no one expects us to present our works. Our books are not on the train. No one—strictly no one—asks us for our texts. That is what makes this train so special. We travel naked, authors without books. A library car designed to house our writings in every European language never got beyond the planning stage. Until Kaliningrad, we would have been best off reading a book entitled The Critique of Pure Illusion.2

Trick question:other people are always the ones asking the questions. Now it’s our turn. What do you think of our literature? Why haven’t you read our books? Why aren’t you interested in what we wrote before and after 19913, and in what we are going to write in the future? Whether we’re going to continue licking the boots of the president of the Republic or ruthlessly continue throwing everything we think into his face? You don’t know anything about what we write and you couldn’t care less.You’re only interested in us because we make you look good.

“Why did you join this trip?” a journalist asks me at the Gare de l’Est in Paris. Or was it the Gare du Nord or the Gare Saint Lazare? I really don’t know anymore. All those train stations start looking the same after a while. Let’s get back to the question.The journalist asked what I think of religions. Damn! That wasn’t it. It was, “Why did you join this trip?” Or something like that. It didn’t matter, just so long as the answer was clever and well-founded. Here you go then: I am on this trip because I wanted another chance to escape from my mountains and my native language, Rhaeto-Romanic, which is spoken by a mere 40,000 people,almost all of whom know each other.We sometimes feel cramped and would like to get out into the so-called wide world to hear and speak other languages. This journey seemed like a godsend to satisfy that basic need, though I will not conceal the fact that it was also inexpensive and accessible. I also wanted once and for all to answer a crucial question that every mountaindweller asks and that Schiller,who was not a mountain-dweller but a poet, put in the following terms: Father, are there countries where there are no mountains? I left, fully aware of the risk that this train could turn into a nightmare, into a train of madness. The reasons that led me into taking this trip are so to speak, practical and cognitive at the same time. A look back: Madrid is astounding; Paris takes itself seriously; Lisbon, destroyed by the 1755 earthquake, is by far Europe’s most disillusioned city. It is the only one that has not repressed its past.It has the oldest soul. What will be left of all these cities one day? Wind. A preliminary summing-up: in a train

A ride through 43 countries

Saint Petersburg TALLINN

RIGA MOSCOW Kaliningrad Hanovre BRUSSELS BERLIN Dortmund Lille PARIS

Bordeaux

LISBON

MADRID

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Malbork

VILNIUS

WARSAW

MINSK

Brest-Litovsk

he Literature Express Europe 2000 was the brainchild of Thomas Wohlfahrt, director of the Berlin Literature Workshop.The ride, which ran from June 4 to July 16, 2000, gathered about 100 writers from all 43 European countries, under the patronage of UNESCO. The 200 or so cultural events, public readings and debates held in the 19 cities where the train stopped, and the discussions between fellow writers all along the 7,000-kilometre railroad route, were aimed at showing a Europe distinct to the one that has been emerging for some time, namely the Europe of business, money, markets and finance.

T

◗

Time to spare:heading to Dortmund in the former dancing car of the Görlitz, a 50-plus train.

compartment, five Tertullians4 are discussing in Spanish,Rhaeto-Romanic, Occitan, French and Catalan whether Europe is only made up of cities and pollution.The discussion started with the fall of the west (that is why this train of “well-being” is rolling east), then shifted to the skirt-chaser who answered to the name of Picasso, street brawls between hooligans in Brussels, the poor organization of the literary train and the exasperation of many of our fellow writers who have had more than enough of wasting their time and would like to be taken more seriously. Later, the little group took a close look at the concept of literary freedom before coming to the overall conclusion that only a writer who does not depend on any publishing company can claim he or she is free. On the approach to Dortmund, we organized a group prayer session to ask for a hotel that was a little more presentable than the pigsties where we stayed in Brussels. And our prayer was answered. In this magnificent German city, we were put up in lavish suites. For two nights we felt like Nobel Prize winners, considerably lifting our spirits, which had been sagging since Paris. At the Hanover Expo2000, we were caught in a sudden downpour. The thunder, lightning and wind were a deliverance after the torrid heat of the day. My shirt sticking to my skin, I ran all the way to the Schweizerpavillon (the Swiss pavilion), which attracted me so irresistibly that this was my fifth visit. For once, Switzerland was illustrated

neither through cows nor Alpine horns. There was no facade, but an open maze with 50 entrances that doubled as exits. An open Switzerland. Hanover was our last stop in the west. It was also the longest day.

We travel naked, authors without books. No one asks for our texts: this is what makes the train so special. Our encounter with the east: on both sides of the presidential palace gate, men of steel were holding their semi-automatic rifles planted in front of them like heavy candelabra. They stared and never blinked. We found that idiotic but got used to it. We walked between the steel men and through the house before reaching the garden to drink and chat. The thoughtful president delivered his eulogy. For the occasion, we were the dead, invited to an umpteenth reception. A whisper was on everyone’s lips: the president is said to be a writer himself. On the train the dissidents were few and those who played the game many, shaming the memory of all the writers who have died in camps and wars. This train had its share of those who had adapted

their principles to suit the circumstances, knuckled under to regimes and now were at war memorials laying wreaths that had been given to them. Their servility is disgusting, something to cry over. Somewhere, at a certain point, the train had to turn into a political train, to the dismay of a great many passengers, since we were supposed to be taking part in a kind of official mission. We were guests, or even diplomats, who were not supposed to give anybody lessons, even when we travelled across dictatorships where some of our colleagues had been imprisoned. Our train was not supposed to degenerate into a train of resolutions or protests.What’s more, the train’s guardian angels bent over backwards trying to prevent it from turning into a dragon. Dragons are unpredictable… ■ 1. Reference to the German-language Swiss artist and writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who wrote a short story called The Tunnel (which is about a train and all its passengers vanishing in the Berthoud tunnel) and painted The Catastrophe (1966),which depicts two trains derailing as they come out of a tunnel. 2. Kaliningrad, formerly known as Königsberg, is the birthplace of the 18thcentury German philosopher Immanuel Kant, author of The Critique of Pure Reason. Once the capital of East Prussia, it came under Soviet control in 1945. 3. Year of the dissolution of the USSR. 4. Tertullian, a brilliant second-century theologian and polemicist who was born and died in Carthage,had a major influence on debates over the arts during the Middle January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

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◗ M E D I A

White fortresses in cyberspace The face of racism changes on the Internet as preppy professionals join the ranks of the “classic” tattooed skinheads. Will they prove even more dangerous? LES BACK Acting Head of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, London. This article is an edited excerpt from his forthcoming co-authored book (with Vron Ware) provisionally entitled THE TROUBLE WITH W HITENESS, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.

A

fter celebrating the Internet as a digital nirvana in which democracy and free speech flourish, we are finally uncovering the dark side in which racists and xenophobes not only broadcast their propaganda in cyberspace but also ply their paraphernalia and hate through international networks.However the spate of scare stories about the burgeoning tide of racist online materials ignores the ultimate question: is the face of racism changing? Most articles focus exclusively on the number of websites, virtual discussion groups and chat rooms spreading the messages of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance and the British National Party, which first seized the Internet as an unregulated and relatively cheap media in the mid-1990s. While there is no doubt that these sites and groups are growing, accurate estimates are difficult to calculate. To investigate hate on the Net, you must combine the skills of a detective, a lie detector and propaganda code breaker. For online materials are part of a digital masquerade that conceals as much as it shows. You cannot simply count and record web addresses because of the frequency in which pages are posted and taken down. However,experts agree that there are hundreds of sites, perhaps as many as 3,000. Much of the debate about hate on the Net has revolved around censorship. Internet Service Providers (ISP) may voluntarily prohibit use of their servers and install filters along with web browsers to prevent access to key racist sites. But it is almost impossible to regulate the Net as

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a whole.The debate about censorship has become a cul-de-sac because of the seemingly irreconcilable tension between the libertarian ethos of free speech and the difficulty in defining the limit of what is morally acceptable to say or write. To some extent, the polemic overshadows the critical issue:what is drawing people into the racist Net world? “WHITE PRIDE WORLDWIDE”— with this slogan, Don Black of the U.S. launched the world’s first and most notorious racist website Stormfront on March 27,1995.Black, a former Klansman, learned his computer skills in a federal prison in Texas where he compulsively worked on the prison’s Radio Shack TRS80 computer at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Once out of jail,Black put his new skills to work to build an international system of followers by offering a trans-local notion of race.

A common language of race and white solidarity Consider this passage from an e-mail sent to Stormfront: “I am a 20-year-old white American with roots in North America dating back 300 years and then into Europe, Normandy, France. Well anyways, I am proud to here [hear] of an organization for the advancement of whites.” Racists like Black are basically using the Internet to foster a notion of whiteness that unites old world racial nationalisms (i.e. in Europe and Scandinavia) with the white diasporas of the New World (i.e. United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and parts of South America). Despite the diversity of racist groups in cyberspace, they share a common language of race and white solidarity. Firstly, this notion of whiteness promotes a racial lineage that is plotted through, and to a large extent sustained in cyberspace.The Internet is the technology of globalization, interconnecting permeable human cultures. Yet in the racist Net-world, the Internet is used to foster an ethos of racial separation.With the goal of establishing “white fortresses” in cyberspace, these racists are forging

In Britain, David Copeland’s racist nail-bombing ca

new connections between ultra right-wing sites in North America, Western Europe and Scandinavia at a considerable pace. Yet, it is still the American websites and news groups that are the most sophisticated and the most active. The big question remains exactly how many people are being drawn into racist activism by the Net? Recently, Alex Curtis—self-proclaimed “Lone Wolf of hate” from San Diego and producer of the extremist magazine The Nationalist Observer—claimed to “reach 100s - 1000s of the most radical racists in the world

each week.” However, it is dangerous to over-estimate the level of activity. The number of white racists regularly involved in the Internet globally is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000, divided into 10 to 20 clusters. Once again, it is impossible to offer anything other than an educated guess. The number of “hits” on a web page, for example, need not indicate “sympathetic inquiries,” rather they could include opponents, monitoring agencies and researchers. The key point is that these relatively small numbers of people can have a significant presence.

Not only are they using the Net for recruitment, but attempts are also being made to combine cyber-activism with that of the “real world.” For example, the RaceLink web page offers a list of activists’ contact details and locations around the world.Additionally,The Aryan Dating Page (now posted on Stormfront) offers a contact service for white supremacists. While most of the profiles are American,there are also personal ads from a range of countries including Brazil, Canada,Holland,Norway, Portugal, U.K., Slovakia and Australia as well as from white South Africans.

Lonely hearts in search of their own kind

mpaign claimed several lives in 1999. The 24-year-old engineer found his recipe for bombs on the Net.

One of the interesting things about scrolling through the personal ads is that the faces that appear are nothing like the archetypal image of “The Racist.” There are very few skinheads with Nazi tattoos: these white supremacist “lonely hearts,” mostly in their twenties and thirties, look surprisingly prosaic. Take 36-year-old Cathy, who lives in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, which is far from an ethnic melting pot, but who is “desperate to move to a WHITE area!” She appears in the photograph in a rhinestone outfit with glitzy earrings:“The picture of me is a little overdone,” she explained.“I had photos done with the girls at the office … I look like an Aryan Princess when I get dressed up. But I am really the girl-nextdoor type.” Or, 19-year-old Debbie from New England, who wrote:“I am [a] young white power woman who seeks someone seriously devoted to the white power movement.A person whose commitment is undaunting. I would like to speak with men who share the same values as I.” The male ads provide an equally unexpected set of portraits of white supremacy. Frank (see photo next page), a 48-year-old divorced single parent from Palo Alto California,writes:“Today I’m a responsible parent and have my views but don’t go out of my way to let it be known unless confronted. I have tattoos, and am down for the Aryan race. So hope to hear from you fine ladies in the near future.” Here Frank presents himself as a kind of white supremacist “new man.” This is contrasted with John Botti’s ad, a 25-year-old from Los Altos who presents himself as a preppy, “going places” kindof-guy. He wrote:“I am looking for some who is as conservative and pretty as hell. Equally as important is someone with a quality education.” These are images of fascism in the information age that bear little resemblance to previous incarnations.This was brought home very powerfully by the image of Max, a 36year-old Canadian, who described himself

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◗ M E D I A

little resemblance to previous incarnations.This was brought home very powerfully by the image of Max, a 36year-old Canadian, who described himself as a “long-time Movement activist.” He listed his interests as anthropology, Monty Python’s humour, the Titanic story, Celtic music and [U.S.] Civil War re-enacting. Max chose to have his photograph taken at his computer keyboard, where he presents himself as the picture of technological proficiency.This struck me, the first time I saw it, as a very appropriate image of the face of today’s racism. However, these postmodern portraits of racism are coloured by fragmented and multiple identities little suited to the disciplined organization of “real world” racist politics. In this mercurial world, can the ideology and commitment to racism be turned off as quickly as the computer? There is some evidence to suggest that Net-racists have a rather chaotic affiliation to white power politics. For example, American Milton J. Kleim, who was once the self-styled “Net Nazi Number 1,” renounced his politics almost overnight.

Shifting from National Socialism to misanthropy Kleim first became involved through Usenet,a network of online newsgroups,as a student in 1993. But he didn’t have a face-to-face meeting with anyone in the racist movement until he graduated in 1995.Less than a year later, he abandoned racism altogether. In an e-mail interview he commented: “The act of leaving was painful, and the aftermath stressful […] I essentially became a ‘nonperson,’ and I haven’t really been denounced […] I only received two or three harassing phone calls from displeased movement adherents… The saddest part is that my ‘movement’ experience was my most exciting, most rewarding time in my life,” he commented. “I’ve moved from National Socialism to Misanthropy.”Racist culture offered Kleim a sense of purpose through an online identity and a temporary resolution to existential crisis.This same sense of purpose comes through in many interviews with Net racists.What is equally true is that this does not last and the virtual mask of racial extremism can be quickly cast off. Not only does individual commitment appear shaky, but so do the larger networks of Net-based racist groups. In the “real world,” each group generally revolves around or owes its existence to a charismatic leader who takes on the initiative of forging alliances. These agreements,however, are generally shortlived because of power struggles between

46 The Unesco Courier - January 2001

The image of a white supremacist “new man”?

the various leaders. In cyberspace, this fall-out seems to be occurring at an even faster pace. Basically, the condensed rate of exchange in cyberspace shortens the fuse for an explosion. The vituperative on-line feud between Harold A. Covington of the National Socialist White People’s Party, William L. Pierce of the National Alliance and both sets of their supporters (in the U.S.) is perhaps the best example of this syndrome. Reflecting on “The Future of the White Internet,” Covington wrote: “The Net is being viciously and tragically abused by a shockingly large number of either bogus or deranged ‘White Racists’ […] I think it is too early just yet to quantify just how the lunacy interacts with, counteracts and affects the impact of the serious political work.It is like panning for gold in a flowing sewer; both the raw and toxic sewage and the gold are there, and the question is how much gold any individual can extract before the fumes and the corruption drive him off—or until he keels over and falls in and becomes part of the sewer system.” The racist use of the Internet is not about to deliver a mass global racist movement. In this sense, the imitators of fascism and Nazism are not in the same league as the zealots of yesteryear. Yet the significance of this phenomenon should not be sought in the numbers of activists.The fact that those involved remain relatively small should not be read as a comforting statistic. What, then, is the nature of this threat? The real danger is perhaps that in the information age isolated acts of racist terrorism may become commonplace. In this respect the 1999 London bombing campaign conducted by David Copeland—who

found his “recipe” for nail bombs on the Net—may be an indication of the form that racist violence will take in this millennium. These acts are perpetrated by individuals whose prime contact with racist politics is via their computer keyboards. ■

Blurring fantasy and reality he combination of intimacy and distance in cyberspace provides a new context for racist harassment. Racists began by sending “mail bombs”or a truckload of junk mail to crash their victims’ computer systems. More recently they started using digital tools to offer the “pleasure”of simulated racial violence. For example, a photograph of a young black man, face down on the floor being beaten and kicked, used to be posted on the Skinheads USA website until a police investigation. By blurring the line between reality and fantasy, this kind of violence is politically slippery but very dangerous. Cyberculture has also given a new lease of life to the “International Jew” as an omnipresent figure of hate. The Internet’s global framework enhances a historical component of anti-Semitism: the notion of an international conspiracy. The “traditional” products of the racist imagination are now circulating further than ever before. ■

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T A L K I N G

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Eduardo Galeano: the open veins of McWorld The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano likes nothing better than to unmask hidden truths. In a wide-ranging interview with Danish journalist Niels Boel, he takes his scalpel to globalization, memory, cultural identity, indigenous rights— and football

G Eduardo Galeano

lobalization This is not a new phenomenon, but a trend that dates back a long while. Globalization has considerably accelerated in recent years following the dizzying expansion of communications and transport and the equally stupefying transnational mergers of capital.We must not confuse globalization with “internationalism”though.We know that the human condition is universal, that we share similar passions, fears, needs and dreams, but this has nothing to do with the “rubbing out” of national borders as a result of unrestricted capital movements. One thing is the free movement of peoples, the other of money. This can be seen very clearly in such places as the border between Mexico and the United States which hardly exists as far as the flow of money and goods is concerned.Yet it stands as a kind of Berlin Wall or Great Wall of China when it comes to stopping people

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The stomach is part of the human soul. The mouth is the gateway from getting across. The right to choose one’s own food The perfect symbol of globalization is the success of firms like McDonald’s, which opens five new restaurants around the world each day. For me there is something more significant than the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the queue of Russians outside McDonald’s on Moscow’s Red Square as the so-called “iron curtain”—which turned out be more like a “mashed potato curtain”— was coming down. The “McDonaldization” of the world is planting plastic food in the four corners of the planet. But the success of McDonald’s has at the same time inflicted a kind of open wound on one of the most basic human rights, the right to choose our own food. The stomach is part of the human soul.The mouth is its gateway.Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s not about how much you eat but what and how you choose to do so. How people prepare food is an important part of their cultural identity. It matters greatly to poor or even very poor people, who have little or no food but who respect traditions that turn the trivial act of barely eating into a small ritual. Against standardization The best side of the world is that it contains many worlds within itself. Such cultural diversity, which is the heritage of all humanity, appears in the different ways people eat, but also in how they think,feel,dream,talk and dance. There’s a very marked trend towards the standardization of cultural behaviour. But there is also a backlash by people who endorse differences that are worth preserving. Emphasizing cultural differences, not social ones, is what gives humankind its many concurrent faces instead of just a single one. In the face of this avalanche of forced standardization, there have been very healthy reactions alongside the odd crazy ones springing from religious fanaticism and other desperate attempts to affirm identity. I don’t think we’re at all doomed to live in a world where the only choice is between dying of hunger or dying of boredom.

48 The Unesco Courier - January 2001

Identity on the move Cultural identity isn’t like a precious vase standing silently in a museum showcase. It’s always moving, changing and being challenged by reality that is itself in perpetual movement. I am what I am, but I’m also what I do to change what I am. There’s no such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is racial purity. Luckily, every culture is made up of some elements that come from afar.What defines a cultural product—whether it be a book, a song, a popular saying or a way of playing football—is never where it comes from but what it is. A typical Cuban drink like a daiquiri has nothing Cuban in it: the ice comes from somewhere else, just like the lemon, the sugar and the rum. Christopher

At the border between Mexico and the U.S.

Columbus first brought sugar to the Americas from the Canary Islands. Yet the daiquiri is considered quintessentially Cuban. The churro fritters of Andalusia originated in the Middle East. Italian pasta first came from China. Nothing can be defined or derided on the basis of its origin. The important thing is what is done with it and how far a community identifies with something that symbolizes its favourite way of dreaming, living, dancing, playing or loving. This is the positive side of the world: a constant intermingling that produces new responses to new challenges. But because of forced globalization, there’s a clear trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-

greater concentration of power in the hands of large media groups. Hope for the future: the Internet and community radio Is the right to freedom of expression, which is written into every country’s constitution, being reduced to nothing more than the right to listen? Is it not also the right to speak? And how many people have the right to speak? These questions are very closely connected with the battering that cultural diversity is currently suffering. Opportunities for independent activity in the world of communications have been greatly reduced. The dominant media groups are imposing doctored and distorted news along with a vision of the world that tends to become accepted as the only one possible. It’s like reducing a face that has millions of eyes to the standard two. What does seem promising is the dawn of the Internet, one of those paradoxes that keeps hope alive. It sprang from the need to coordinate global military strategy—in other words, to serve the cause of war and death. But it is now the forum for a myriad of voices that were barely noticed before. Today they are heard and networks can be created using this new tool. It’s true that the Internet can also be used towards commercial ends or to manipulate people. But the network has definitely opened up very important areas of freedom for expressing independent views, which tend to be ignored by television and the print media. Good things are happening in radio too. The growth of community radio stations in Latin America is encouraging a much wider spectrum of people to express themselves. Talking to people about what is happening is not the same thing as listening to their own voices recounting their lives, when this is possible and when freedom of expression is respected. End and means In Ancient Greece, knives were convicted along with the murderer.When a knife was used in a crime, the judges threw it into a river.We must not confuse the means with the end. Latin America’s misfortune is that the U.S. model of

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Beijing has not escaped McDonaldization.

commercial television has taken root. We’ve learned nothing from the European television model, which is geared towards different ends. In countries such as Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, television still plays a very enriching and important cultural role thanks to a degree of public ownership—even though it’s not as strong these days. Here in Latin America,

by virtue of the North American television model, anything that sells is good and what doesn’t is bad. The indigenous struggle One of the great hidden strengths and energy sources in Latin America is the people, who have expressed themselves through the revival of indigenous movements and the

tremendous force of the values they stand for.These values are about harmony with nature and sharing lives in communities not focused on greed. They are values drawn from the past but which speak for the future and are relevant for all of us today. They are widely shared because they are values everyone needs to grasp in a world where compassion and solidarity have been seriously wounded

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Many indigenous people burnt alive for idolatry were simply environmentalists

in recent years and in some cases destroyed. Ours is a world focused on selfishness, on a belief in “everyone looking out for their own self.” People and land Five centuries ago, people in Latin America were taught to separate nature from Man—or so-called Man—which in fact meant men and women. Nature was placed on one side, human beings on the other. The same divorce took place the world over. Many of the indigenous people burned alive for worshipping idols were simply the environmentalists of their time who were practising the only kind of ecology that seems worthwhile to me— an ecology of communion with nature. Harmony with nature and a communal approach to life ensured the survival of ancient indigenous values despite five centuries of persecution and contempt. For centuries, nature was seen as a beast that had to be tamed—as a foreign enemy and a traitor. Now that we’re all “greens,” thanks to deceitful advertising based on words rather than deeds, nature has become something to be protected. But whether nature is to be protected or mastered and exploited for profit, it’s still seen as separate from us.

October 12, 1999: Ecuadorians protest the legacy of Spanish colonialism.

We have to recover this sense of communion with nature. Nature is not a landscape, it’s something inside us, something we live with. I’m not just talking about forests, but about everything to do with the reverence for the natural that the indigenous people of the Americas have and always have had. They see nature as sacred in the sense that every harm we cause turns against us one day or another. So every crime

becomes a suicide.This can be seen in the large cities of Latin America,which are bad copies of those in the developed world where it’s just about impossible to walk or breathe clean air..We’re living in a world whose air, water and soil are poisoned. But most of all, our minds are poisoned. I truly wish that we could manage to summon up enough energy to heal ourselves.

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Memory as a catapult In my book Days and Nights of Love and War, I’ve asked myself whether our memories will allow us to be happy. I still have no answer.There’s a North American novel in which a great-grandfather meets his great-grandson. The old man remembers nothing because he’s lost his memory. He’s senile. His thoughts are as colourless as water.The grandson doesn’t have any memories because he’s too young. As I read the novel, I thought: “This is bliss.” But this is not the happiness I’m after. I want happiness that comes from both remembering and from fighting against remembering.A happiness that includes the sadness, pain and injury of experience but also goes forward. Not memory that works like an anchor, but like a catapult. Not a memory that you just arrive at, but one that’s a launch pad. There’s an American indigenous tradition found in the islands of the Pacific, in Canada and also places like Chiapas,in Mexico. It goes like this: when a master potter gives up his trade because his hands are no longer steady and his eyesight is failing, there’s a ceremony at which he presents his best pot, his masterpiece,to a young potter just starting out.The apprentice takes the flawless pot and smashes it into a thousand pieces on the ground. He then picks them up and mixes them into his own stock of clay. That’s the kind of memory I believe in. Self-portrait I find it hard to categorize any of the books I’ve written.It’s difficult to draw the line between fiction and fact.What I like best is telling stories. I feel I’m a storyteller. I give and take, back and forth. I listen to voices and transform them through the creative act into a story, an essay, a poem,a novel.I try to combine genres to go beyond the standard divisions and convey a complete message because I believe you can create such a synthesis with human language. There’s no divide between journalism and literature. Literature is the totality of written messages that a society produces in whichever form it chooses. You can always say what you feel like saying, whether as a journalist or a writer. Good journalism can also be fine literature as José Marti, Carlos Quijano, Rodolfo Walsh and many others have shown. I’ve always been a journalist and want to continue because once you enter the

magic world of newspaper offices, who can pull you out again? You are taught how to be brief, to summarize—an interesting exercise for someone who wants to write about so many things. You’re also forced to come out of your little world to face reality and dance to the tune of others. You have to get out and listen to people. But there’s a downside, mainly the urgency. Sometimes when I’m writing I get stuck on a word and spend three hours looking for another. That’s one luxury journalism couldn’t afford to give me. Dreams and vigilance My only task is to try to reveal a masked reality, to write about what we see and what remains hidden. It is a reality that comes from being on watch, a false reality, sometimes a deceptive one, but also one capable of telling unknown or rarely heard truths. There’s no magic formula for changing

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reality unless we start by looking at it as it is. To transform it, you have to begin by accepting it. This is the problem in Latin America.We still cannot see that.We are blind towards our own selves because we have been trained to see through the eyes of others. The mirror only reflects an opaque glint, and nothing more. And football... All Uruguayans are born shouting “goal” and that’s why there’s always such a tremendous racket in our maternity wards. I wanted to be a football player like all Uruguayan boys. I started playing when I was eight years old but I was no good at it because I was so clumsy. The ball and I never got along. It was a case of unrequited love. I was also a disaster in another way.When an opposing team played a good game, I’d go and congratulate them—an unforgivable sin in the rules of modern football. ■

INTERVIEW BY NIELS BOEL

GALEANO: THE JOY OF STORYTELLING ven when he is compiling painstakingly detailed accounts of social discontent, the pleasure Eduardo Galeano takes in telling his story is palpable. The Open Veins of Latin America (1971) is a point of reference for anyone who wishes to understand the past and present of Latin America.It starts with a puzzle: why, he asks, has this continent so abundantly blessed by Mother Nature had such an unfortunate social and political history? The book,as gripping as a police thriller, tells with passion, lucidity and indignation the history of what he describes as the looting of Latin America, first by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and then by the rest of the West and the ruling classes of the countries themselves. Galeano fearlessly breaks through divisions between literary genres. His books, in which narrative and essays, poetry and reportage all mingle, assemble voices from people’s souls and the streets to form a compound of reality and reminiscence. Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, 60 years ago.There he became editor-in-chief

E

of the weekly magazine Marcha and the newspaper Época. In Buenos Aires, he founded and ran the magazine Crisis. He went into exile in Argentina and Spain in 1973 and returned to Uruguay in early 1985.His books have been translated into various languages and his journalistic output has also been prolific. As well as The Open Veins of Latin America, he has published: Memory of Fire trilogy (Genesis, 1982; Faces and Masks, 1984; Century of the Wind, 1986) The Book of Embraces (1989) Walking Words (1993) Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1995) Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking Glass World (1998) We Say No (1989),a collection of articles and essays Galeano received the Casa de las Américas book award in 1975 and 1978. His Memory of Fire trilogy won the American Book Award from the University of Washington and was honoured by Uruguay’s Ministry of Culture in 1989. ■

January 2001 - The Unesco Courier

51

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In the next issue

many voices one world

Focus: ■ Features, reports and viewpoints from Colombia, Congo, ex-Zaire, Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia…. Features include: ■ Mothers face their daughters in Argentina

FOCUS February 2001:

Life after the state collapses

■ Nuclear power: the answer to global warming? ■ Drug companies: why they’re not curing the ills of the poor ■ The Net’s disenchanted pioneers ■ A tale of two Russian schools ■ Yul Choi: spearheading South Korea’s anti-nuclear movement

The UNESCO Courier is available on the Internet:

@ www.unesco.org/courier Published in 27 languages