Where is Michel Gutelman NOW?
Propaganda, Ethics and Swidden Agriculture
Endless Fables
We would like to make it very clear at the outset that swidden agriculture is one of the most economic means to grow food, and is one of the most environmentally safe ways to grow food.
The basic concept of swidden agriculture is to farm one to three alternate crops (rice / soybeans) on the land and then allow the land to rest for many years, a multiple specie wild thicket coming back, which provide renewal of top soil, plant species, insects and animal life.
After years, the land is then recut, and planted once again. Religious Jewish texts require that land be rested at least once every seven years.The Akha and other mountain farmers rest the land much more than that.
It is hard to fathom how people could grow food in a more economic way. Shifting them to cash crops, in order to buy their food, does not mean that the food they buy is being somehow grown in a more environmentally conserving fashion somewhere else, with the added cost of the oil that must be consumed in order to transport it in trucks.
However, if we even are to suggest the issue of perma culture, the fact is that fields are still needed for rice, where it is impossible to be growing other permanent crops in the rice, such as fruit trees. So the issue becomes, will the consumer of the rice grow the rice, or become dependent on a high resource consumption model to purchase rice that is of an inferior genetic quality and is highly milled from some distant location where chemicals are most likely employed?
Further we add to this discussion the fact that SE Asian dry farmed mountain rice is one of the heaviest dry kernels with one of the largest genetic complexities, as compared to lowland rice which has lost much of its nutritional value.
What is particularly disturbing about this discussion is that non ethnic peoples who have never farmed mountain rice, who have never lived in these mountains, are dictating from their books and science, what the Akha will grow, what they will eat, where they will live and how they will die. The overtones of Green Hate could not be more clear. Individuals with NO threatened interest from European countries are imposing their THEORIES on ethnic minority peoples who never voted for them. The results of these imposed theories is the destroyed lives of the Akha and other peoples, who in the end, even when they are dead, are suppose to some how give honor to the ACADEMICS who were "so much more wise" than they.
The current literature available does not illustrate accurately any clear improved alternative from the west, by which ethnic peoples who have lived in SE Asia for thousands of years, should now grow their food in a BETTER fasion. Any close inspection of an Akha village left in its natural habitat quickly defines a complex system of foods, plants, animal life, knowledge of each and every bug and leaf in the forest and what it is good for. The village is moved, to "protect us" from swidden agriculture, the land is logged, half the people die, and then there is nothing. After imposing policies of opium eradication, bans on swidden agriculture, and finally poverty and death, the western ACADEMICS insist that the ethnic peoples' lifestyle and subsistence agriculture is not able to sustain them. Such rubbish could never be further from the truth. The policies pushed by people from Europe and the US are the very causal events that have created the humanitarian disaster, in order to meet western needs for jobs, globalization (neo-colonialism) and hegemony.
In the context of the environmental economic situation the mountain people have co-existed with for thousands of years, one can not find a more economic model than what they were living by. In the absence of this model, vast lands of forest have been logged and destroyed, while the lands that the ethnic peoples' till is suddenly the focus for western micromanagement. Globalization demands that every country become a producer, forcing its poor into the cities and factories, betrayed by consumerist illusions, in order to pay the TAX the west demands. The TAX of empire has never gone away, but now it is cloaked in the policies of FAIR TRADE, FREE MARKETS, GENDER ISSUES, Free, Prior and Informed CONSULTATION, GLOBALIZATION AND POVERTY REDUCTION.
The ethnic peoples are made to move and abdicate or die. After they are dead, it can easily be said, and is being said, that poverty has been eradicated. Being as NGO's are unwilling to publish the death stats that they are VERY WITNESSES to, the GLOBALISTS can claim that it was all a grand success.
Meanwhile we still wait to receive a clear improvement on swidden agriculture.
Michel Gutelman was one man who proposed a ban on swidden agriculture in SE Asia. He even wanted it to be criminalized so that anyone caught practicing the growing of food for their families in this fashion should be put in prison. But WHERE is Michel Gutelman NOW? Now that so many Akha have died, thanks to his expertise? Will he bury them, will he be a father to their children, will he rock them to sleep at night, or give them money so they don't have to work in a brothel? Is this just another acceptable event for policy makers, NGO workers busy having coffee, and people who always love a spin in a new Land Cruiser? But GOD FORBID that they should miss a flight, bend a fender, or spill coffee on their documents.
Meanwhile, Thousands have died at the hand of their policies.
Will the NGO's continue to say, "We knew it not." ?