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On Whose side are We ?

There is the myth about which many people believe and which leads people to live with the misconception that: Peasants are so underfed, so ignorant of the real forces oppressing them and conditioned into a state of passivity that they are beyond the point of being able to mobilize themselves. This is not true, it is again an other myth.

Bombarded with pictures showing the poor as weak as hungry, we should not lose sight of the obvious fact that they must exert themselves tremendously just to stay alive, traveling long distances and working 10 to 14 hours a day. In at least that sense, the poor are hardly passive. They represent great potential energy that, once released, could be applied to their own development.

Moreover many living and working with the poor in underdeveloped countries often have been astonished at how well they comprehend the forces oppressing them. In a report for the U.N. Asian Development Institute, the four Asian authors with much experience in organizing with the rural poor concluded that the poor? have an understanding of the working of the economic system can describe in detail the processes(wage, exploitation, money lending, bribery and price discrimination)through which exploitation takes place.

Those with direct experience working with poor peasants also counter the notion that it is mainly superstitious religious beliefs that keep the poor down. Lasse and Lisa Berg, writing of their experiences in India in their book Face to Face, observe that, while reasoning based in religious beliefs might characterize India?s middle class, the poor almost never cite religion to explain their daily actions. ?If asked why they do not revolt? note the Bergs, they do not answer that they want to be reborn to a better position; they answer that they are afraid of the landowner or the government or the police.

But stressing both the powerful structure of control over the livesof the poor and their understandable fear can cause us to ignore the fact that in every country in the world where people are hungry there is a struggle going on right now over who controls food producing resources, in Mexico, The Philippines, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil Chad, the United States, El Salvador Bangladesh, Thailand or Haiti and the list could go on and on. Among those standing up to resist are the very people who have been perceived by so many as?too oppressed ever to change?. For us here on ?Sakapfet? the question should also be: On whose side in fact are we?

Moreover, so many who would question what peasants can do seem unaware that there are countries such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Angola where after decades of intense struggle, mainly peasant-based organizations, independence has recently been won. Now these people are turning their energies into eradicating hunger and building the basis of genuine food security. Neither must one forget that since only the early 1950?s over 40 percent of the population of the underdeveloped world have freed themselves from the fear of famine through their own efforts.

Because of the selective way news is transmitted to us, we in countries like the United States are often unaware of the courageous struggles millions of people everywhere to gain control over food producing resources rightfully theirs.

Events come to us filtered through a lens that causes us to identify not with people like us, but with the governing elites in developing countries. We once read, for example, a news account of the depressed economy of Senegal, ruined by a fall- off in production of the main export crop, peanuts. Simply presented this way, our natural response was to ask: What can be done to spur the lagging production of this crop? How should Senegal be helped to get the economy rolling again? We thus were made to identify with the export economy of Senegal, not with the people.

The real story was that many Senegalese peasants had purposefully spurned cash -cropping in order to grow food for themselves, particularly millet and sorghum. This shift was interpreted by some as the reaction of tradition-bound peasants. On the contrary, this example of peasant resistance can be seen as a positive break away from tradition, if being traditional means doing what the political and social hierarchy has always demanded. These lessons are seldom, if ever drawn for us; such is the power of selective news that reinforces the notion of the passivity of the world?s disenfranchised.

To counter the myth of the passive poor we must find ongoing sorces of news that go behind the selective, filtered information offered us by most of the media. After presenting all the segments which can be of interests for all of us on sakapfet, I will include a list of some of the publications and organizations that provide news and analysis of the struggles of ordinary people in countries around the world for their food rights. These sources will be invaluable in uprooting (déchouker) the myth of the passive poor and the companion myth, that of our own powerlessness.

Mèsi anpil pou opotinité-a.

This research has been conducted through the channels of The Institute for Food and Development Policy. U.S.A.

A suivre

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