[crosstalk]
[Maria Elisa Christie] Okay so we're gonna get started, great. Well, thank you all for coming. I think
probably everybody here, maybe almost, knows me. I'm Maria Elisa Christie, I'm
director of women and gender and international development at CIRED,
the Center for International Research, Education, and Development. Thank you for
coming to our second WGD discussion series for this semester. We want to
thank our sponsors, Outreach and International Affairs. And I want to
start with an acknowledgement of the land that we're on, so we acknowledge
that the Tutelo Monocan people who are the traditional custodians of the land
on which we work and live and we recognize their continuing connection to
the land water and air that Virginia Tech consumes. We pay respect to the
Tutelo Monacan nations and to their elders, past, present, and emerging.
So I have a sign-up sheet that's in the back there and another one that I have here
that I'm going to pass around this way please please fill it out and if you
want to be added to our list or if you're not on it say yes and if you
don't just don't say yes and we won't send you anything but we we don't spam
you on that listserv okay we only send things that are gender and international
development so mostly announcements about our discussion series, any
updates would be on our website and discussion series and presentation will
last about 40 minutes and then we'll have about 10 minutes for Q&A and then
we do have the room a little bit longer so you come up and talk to Vikram
afterward as well. So let me introduce Dr. Vikram Singh Gill. He's an assistant
professor in ASPECT, the Alliance for social political ethical and
cultural thought. I'm an affiliate there actually. His research interests are
generally situated at the intersection of international political economy
political ecology agrarian studies decolonial studies critical race theory
and global history. Dr. Gill has published on the impacts of the global
food system on indigenous peoples including an article titled "Can the
river speak? Epistemological confrontation and the rise and fall of
the land grab in Gambella, Ethiopia" in the Journal of Environmental Planning.
In addition to ongoing research on the intersection of colonialism and the
climate crisis, Dr. Gill is currently part of a SSHRC funded documentary
social sciences humanities Research Council out of Canada okay because I was
thinking documentary film project titled four stories food sovereignty and I
think he's gonna tell us about that. Thank you.
[Bikrum Singh Gill] So thank you Maria Elisa and everybody with the CIRED and women and gender
development for kindly inviting me here today to to share kind of the beginnings
of this project. It's very much in the beginning stages and I really appreciate
the land acknowledgement to begin with I was also going to do that but since this
already be done by just wanted to stress that indigenous peoples they just
happened and there's simultaneously growing
movement in Blacksburg and elsewhere around climate justice and it's really
important that we link those because globally indigenous folks are often to
the front line being impacted by the climate crisis and actually redressing
submit they need to be involved as we move forward really really in the center
of that right so that's very much appreciated so the main focus of my talk
today is to introduce this project, four stories about food sovereignty, which is
a transnational participatory research project which seeks ascend into
conversation and relation for different indigenous communities the Sangha from
Limpopo Province of South Africa Palestinian of particularly those in
macao refugee camp in Jordan also the whyyou people's kind of live
between Venezuela and Colombia and the South nation to kind of live in the
Pacific Northwest and on the west coast of Canada in the province of British
Columbia so this project is setting these four communities into conversation
with one another particularly because each of these communities are
confronting intersecting social and ecological crises as I mentioned on
climate or on livelihood but also very political crises around marginalization
and so we're trying to think through what it means to put communities with
similar struggles into conversation how they can support one another and what's
unique about this project in addition to the transnational
character is that it will take the form of a documentary so it's kind of the
finished output will be a documentary film
now I'm not a as the introduction suggested I'm not in film studies so
this is not gonna be that interesting of a presentation it's not a filmmaker
going walking through that process but yeah that's that is that it's kind of
where we're at now the project is just getting off the ground
we received three years of funding from shirk these social sciences and
Humanities Research Council Virginia Tech is a partner and very very it was
it was good to be here coming here first year last year to get the support
getting it off the ground the Institute for society culture and
environment particularly on acknowledge day they were very helpful in providing
initial funds for the grant application and we what we're all right now as we
just recently launched the project last month so we had thought we were gonna be
further along so when I was asked to get the talk and me as some of you know I
had been planning to go to Jordan this past summer to conduct the initial kind
of field working at the filming off for gone but that got delayed until next
summer so this is very much an introduction at this point but we did
have a workshop in September which was very generative and I'm gonna be sharing
today that subtitle the potential and limits of community action and
transnational solidarity under conditions of global capitalism now that
seems like a very big kind of question and topic but that's actually my
experience in the workshop was what I was hearing from the different
communities right the challenges that they were confronting really spoke to
this question so I will get to that but the the workshop itself it was very
generative and putting the all four communities came together with for maybe
the only time during the life of the project on the South territory in Canada
so here's a this is just I guess that's not
but okay so there's a couple of women there from the from the Popo South
Africa Josefina moped boo and then the two on the outside are from the weiu
community in Colombia and there's Molly she's from Palestine and chief Gorden
planus is the chief of the south nation in Canada in Victoria there so the the
purpose of the workshop was they collaborated we wanted to collaborate on
how what the documentary would look like what people wanted out of the
documentary what were the major issues in crisis that were being addressed one
sort of initiatives each community had launched to confront these intersecting
crises right and what they could learn from one another in that process so I
have a little clip I'll show that we've made from the workshop which maybe we'll
capture kind of the spirit of the workshop a little better than
so yeah that was a kind of a nice I think short clip of what was happening
during the workshop there was a lot of learning from the South people in
particular so we're on their territories so they would take us out to demonstrate
what they were doing around food sovereignty in their in their
territories and you know the large canoe we around that large I kind of can use
that was built by the seok and it was a three-hour kind of exercise where we
paddled along the river or and in the water to learn about the importance of
safe fishing and the relationship between fish and forests for the South
people and some of the really powerful moments that I found from the workshop
was the really intense affective connections that the communities would
have when these stories are being shared right so when the South wood stairs
share stories around their confrontation with logging companies and the impacts
that's had on fishing that really resonated with the other communities are
very powerful ways right and so it's a very basic point but it's still very
essential you put people into conversation my struggle is your
struggle and what food like food is something obviously food sovereignty has
put it on the agenda in a very different way but food for all for communities the
relationship to food and land is central to addressing their crisis right crises
around marginalization livelihood climate but what I was hearing from all
four communities was particularly a consistent set of challenges that kept
returning right so there was a lot of initiatives they said we keep having
these initiatives these local projects right however the problems remain and so
that's kind of what I want to talk about for the rest of the talk today and so
these are some of the themes and questions that come out of the workshop
for me that we spent together the first one I'll get to more towards the end
there on what food sovereignty is and what it means for indigenous peoples
there why is it so important the second point around structural power
that's getting to the limitation part of the talk right is whether it was mining
companies whether it was settler colonial States
right communities are expressing frustration the inability to confront
those who exercise power over them on an equal footing right and so you know
there's a frustration that you can exist in a world of donors and constantly
asking for support but there was a lot of discussion about imagining a
different world where you didn't have to do that right but that seems to be
asking for a confrontation with structural power which I don't know if a
project such as this one can do and then what are we doing mother what is that
way that's the question that I'm wondering and the third theme that might
not come up today but I just put it up there that's kind of running through the
project is the politics of knowledge okay so this is very much a project
centered on the indigenous peoples from these four communities very much
themselves they will be they will be the filmmakers right they will be very much
coming up with the film posing the questions sharing different initiatives
but where does that leave us as researchers right like the thing that
I'm worried about and I've spoken with some people in the room about this in
different context is how do you make sure you're not an extractive
relationship with we're building careers at the same time as people are saying
like hey you're not the first person who's come to our community right and
what what is so you might go back and publish and share this and you want and
this becomes a part of your identity but what is left for those if you're
celebrating local knowledge in this way so I'm gonna start with a few points
around structural power so I want to situate food sovereignty and I'm kind of
doing this also because again there's not so much I can show you to this point
from the projects I will I will live into the contextual kind of context so
where is food sovereignty what is it intervening into what historical contest
stations and how are these indigenous kind of communities situated
historically so I'll start with our favorite boogie man boogie person
gobo colonial capitalism what a phrase right but the reason why I'm kind of
starting with this as a structure to food sovereignty within which it's
located in to which it is intervening again because based on the workshop this
was a lot of what you kept hearing right is these kind of constantly these
constant interventions by state mining companies under the guise of development
but what if we clarified what the mining companies were all about and so a
framework like global colonial capitalism is helpful because it
emphasizes that capitalism in its from its inception
it's very Constitution is it handy a colonial system and it's inherently
global ok so we think what some of my food obviously to get the sense that
food comes today in a very transnational circuit it's not local it's very global
but it's also coming through colonial relations right and they're the way that
just a quick point on how this works if we understand global capitalism to be a
profit motivated system a system that runs on profit and of capitalist actors
competing with one another in markets for greater profits greater share of
profits greater market share the you know long-standing Marxist critique is
that profit ultimately comes out of the exploitation of Labor ok so capital will
put labour to work and the difference between what it costs to reproduce a
worker and the final price of the product is profit a surplus surplus
value that Karl Marx will go now feminist and post-colonial interventions
have made clear that that capital labor relationship itself can only be
sustained through gendered and racialized power relations right so what
makes that sustainable why don't workers revolt if they're being exploited well
there is a second and third sphere unpaid labor of supporting workers ok so
what does unpaid labor would look like it might be in the home through the
naturalization of women's Labor's right so that supports working capital does
not to pay that cost so that opens further space for profit and another
arena through which the capital labor relations
sustainable is through colonization and periods even if we think about today in
the United States with so much discussion on inequality what really
helps sustain relations as well you can go to Walmart or you can go to Target
and you can access goods even on lower incomes because these goods are being
sourced around the world based on very very cheap labor and cheap land and
historically cheap labor was created through violent relations of
colonization immigrants and so while that led to immense development for the
global north and wealthy part of the world it has led to a miseration and
struggle in the global south and that's going to take me to the second context
into which we can locate food sovereignty so what has been the
response to try to stabilize this entire system well we can locate this response
broadly as the development project so as colonized states in the middle of
the 20th century started gaining independence there was a demand to
address global inequality right so decolonization was really centered on
this how can you have in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
massive well Mike Dean is called late Victorian Holocaust right tens of
millions of people across the colonized world starving to death in the midst of
kind of the growth of wealth elsewhere and so decolonization was asking for
this to stop and to close the gap of woman equality and to address poverty
now at the dawn of the development project in the mid 20th century there
were two broad approaches that you can identify that we're forward one you can
call we can call it D colonial anti capitalism which again insisted and
operated on the assumption that global inequality could be understood in a
relational sense to global wealth okay so these are Hopf operating through the
same historical processes and therefore to address it means to address poverty
there is no technical salute in a sense until power is redistributed
okay in a very broad sense so this is the states that then took up projects of
nationalization okay so to nationalize resources that were under the control
the colonial core the core of the global kind of capitalist world system the
second approach is modernization theory which was forwarded from the United
States right famously to Walt Rostow his book which had the subtitle an ancient
communist manifesto a non-communist manifesto so he was trying to provide a
replacement to vs. and this assumption was that global inequality is not a
result of relationality it's a result of a lack okay so in the self there's a
lack of knowledge there's a lack of technical capacity there's a lack of
capital and in the north there's an abundance of this due to internal
cultural factors right so it's not a scientific racist theory but in many
ways it reproduces some of the same kind of assumptions right there's a lot that
needs to be filled here not by the civilizing project but by the
development project now although these are two very different visions while
unifying both was that being operated within the nation-state okay so it's
understood that development should happen within the state now how does
this apply how is this applied to food and agriculture this will be important
as I come back to the project later on in terms of addressing some of the
limitations so as the development project was taken up with regards to
food agriculture and development in the initial stage of the development project
these two approaches took form and agriculture the first one the D colonial
kinda anti capitalist approach emphasized organizational transformation
so what is this this is land reform this is a land redistribution okay so to
address hunger malnutrition to address create growing surplus food to move more
people out of agriculture and into industrial sectors that can raise
standards of living that first approach was one that argued this can happen
by breaking up large estates okay that were put in place very often by colonial
states because it was easier to extract sugar to extract cotton to extract wheat
from states if it's a landlord controlling two thousand three thousand
acres of land because the landlord can act as a disciplinary kind of force
right so the first approach emphasized breaking up those estates and either
transforming them into collective farms or into small family-owned farms and you
can see this process unfold first in the Chinese Revolution and it unfolds
further across the Korean Peninsula Vietnam Cuba or Tamala Congo and Iran
now a lot of those are not successful but I had them up there for a reason
right I was at a talk to book lunch the other day where they Copeland made the
same point that for some reason the United States and the Western world have
been very uncomfortable in this force approach so Guatemala
yes famously is known the arbenz government 1954 wants to redress
colonial inequality by redistributing land to indigenous peasants who for five
hundred years had been kind of displaced and denied sovereignty over their lands
and our bans is overthrown immediately in a CA coupe now Congo and Iran very
similar things happen around reform and nationalization so this first approach
is one that has been imposed very consistently by the powerful states in
the global North led by the United States now that second approach is one
that these states that oppose the first approach forward it instead so this is
the modernization Theory approach to agriculture which emphasizes a
technological diffusion rather than a change in power relations maybe a quick
point of what that first approach again the idea is that if you give people land
and they working collectively or in small family units they will be more
motivated to engage in labor so forms and that will lead to
productivity people are more invested and then the surplus that they produce
will cycle back in but will slowly allow for people to brad's
out of agriculture right now the option the other option that doesn't address
power relations is the Green Revolution option right so this was an option that
emphasized at using technologies so you can't have productivity increases you
can't address these issues through organizational change it's more you need
to introduce petroleum fertilizers chemical pesticides hybrid seeds water
intensive agriculture that can massively and rapidly increase food production
that is more important than land reform and that these were most famously
associated India Mexico and the Philippines and Mexico is very
interesting as an example because the Mexican case it initially when the first
half under the Cardenas government Mexico started nationalizing oil which
Standard Oil did not like Mexico initially initiated land reforms to
benefit indigenous peoples to protect which NAFTA finally did away with which
will led to the southeast uprising but Mexico so that Cardenas reforms in the
1930s this were overthrown again with support from intelligence communities in
the United States and in place of that project of radical reform and
redistribution Mexico became the first side of the Green Revolution so Mexico
and India the Philippines do witness rapid growth but both again are both of
these approaches still assume that the national state is the key site for
forwarding development now this gives way disagreement on national development
the development should happen within States States need to be protected
whether to modernization theory or through radical kind of redistribution
this is I'm done through the project of neoliberal structural adjustment and I
would I look very much agree with those and insist that we remembered when we
come back to why is it that projects like the one I'm
about today continually encounter these limitations around structural power what
was neoliberalism is motivated by I would say a project of the imperial
court to resolve what was a crisis in the court okay
so there was a crisis by the 1970s of over accumulation there was too much
capital with no profitable elements and this was famous in the u.s. agricultural
sector the u.s. agricultural sector was over producing massively did not have
sufficient markets with which to realize profit and so the objective the way to
overcome the over accumulation of capital to much capital not enough
places for capital to go well how do we open new fields for the profitable
redeployment of capital and the plan that was kind of finalized and it's kind
of well known so we'll talk about it later but this was to force global
States global south states to open up their economies and this was implemented
it was effective bruised structural adjustments so indebted states in the
global south who are dead it for reasons that we'll get into now but if we want
we can talk about that afterwards but indebted states when they had to go over
loans from the World Bank and the IMF which were financial institutions again
controlled by global North States again primarily the United States but also the
EU to get a loan they had to agree to open up their economies and they had to
agree to four major policy measures privatization liberalization
deregulation and austerity so reduce your state expenses let the private
sector come in and especially open up your economy to global market and wise
they couldn't just say the argument can't just be well this is needed
because we have a over accumulation of capital crisis okay there's an ideology
that is advanced and I would argue the continuing of Germany of this ideology
is why we look at projects like the ones we're looking at they continue to
encounter these limitations right these structures of power continue to be
emerge because there's an ideological cover and the ideological cover for your
liberalism was well we're not opening up economies and radically adjusting them
just so over accumulated capital can access
greater markets right this is because very clearly global markets are the most
superior way to allocate resources and the state needs to get out of the way
the state is inefficient and it's the market we should subject all labor and
language resources all over the world to market forces and if you can't compete
then you should get out of that sector and find another one you can't until you
can finally find something that's your niche and that's what development
becomes under neoliberalism niche within a global market rather than nationally
developmental states right so it goes from the nation state to a global unit
of analysis where you gotta find your place so what did this mean for food and
agriculture well scholars have kind of food integrated studies have emphasized
that this gave rise to a particular regime that they referred to as a new
Liberal leadership in the first instance these were some policies and ideology
redefined food security so I was going to read a quote and in my haste this
morning I forgot to write it down but if you want to look it up it's by John
Block who was the u.s. okay so this is gonna expose myself ok so John block
would have been an agricultural secretary in 1986 right at the height of
kind of the new liberal adjustment era and so if you look up this quote maybe I
can share it it's because it's a really really fascinating port right so his
what he says is states in the South are mistaken for thinking that food security
means growing your own food you should grow or use your land for what you can
get the biggest price point on the international market and then use that
foreign exchange to buy food from us because our farmers produce so much or
European farmers might produce so much right that's food security so they
redefine food security as a market relation again based upon this believe
that in a world of scarce resources the market can bested
how labor and land in different areas should be applied so now this allows
again ideological cover for corporate agribusiness to emerge and to dominate
the global food system okay so the 1980s and 90s particularly see an intensive
growth of the domination of firms like Cargill and I'm sure people here freely
with Cargill but if you want an interesting read for the speaker this is
an aside but check out cargos relationship with Brazil the Amazon you
want to see what global agribusiness gets up to and how powerful it has
become the story of the Amazon fires incomplete if you don't we don't
understand how this powerful brain trading kind of company has been
intervening in the sell for decades but so these neoliberal policies in power
kind of the corporate sector right so now they're able to go in and dump goods
they're also now free to go in and set up plantations because that layer of
third-world nationalism is coming to an end now a very good example of this
shift is post-apartheid South Africa where this new liberal kind of
market-based ideology okay so apartheid ends and of course apartheid in South
African apartheid the white settler farmers maybe 5% of the population ends
up owning 90% of the arable land if not more and in earlier era as we saw there
was a there was a slogan of third world revolution right land to the tiller
right but it was armed revolutions that we must go and take the landlords land
because it's sort of this is a thinking from India to China to elsewhere of
peasants they're not going to give it up because they haven't been oppressed by
these landlords for so long why would they freely so we must confront their
power with our power right so is a question of politics and political
property okay because I'm gonna I'm gonna speed this up a bit this is just
so so interesting to talk I lost to my own research interests bees
so but the South African point I will elaborate upon because it's important
right so at that time the World Bank was sponsoring the post apartheid transition
and based upon this governing ideology it wasn't no we must break up large
white stuff upon this is unjust the argument was the market must do this
so the World Bank said we will sponsor and we will get donors to sponsor
market-based land reform so what is market-based latter form it is a willing
buyer willing seller model so you can't just go and take somebody's pot that's
inefficient right that will lead to corruption and cronyism if they want to
sell it you want to buy it then we can step in and subsidize that transaction
25 years later and very little land is redistributed so the celebration of post
apartheid South Africa overlooks this glaring glaring kind of lack in the
transition era right and those places where land has been attempted to be
forcibly taken since then are those of the international development community
will often vilified so I'm thinking someplace like Zimbabwe where you did
have land reclamation in the 2000s but Zimbabwe becomes the villain to the
heroic story of South Africa the food sovereignty movement is actually being
informed and radicalized by Zimbabwe but I won't have time to get into that but
we can talk about that as an outcome of these kind of policy shifts there was a
major agrarian crisis that afflicted the global South okay so you have tens of
millions of people in movement because they're lively that was undermined that
being forced to compete with large global grain trading companies right
with the removal of state support so the massive migration of the 99
into the 2000s from villages to cities and we are in the midst of the greatest
kind of rural to urban migration maybe in human history way a lot of that was
propelled by these neoliberal shifts that undermined the livelihood capacity
of peasant farmers himself now this crisis is social but it's also
ecological as we know when you construct a global food system that increases food
miles that has impacts for climate but this also had impacts on the soil
quality of those across the world increasing soil erosion and bankruptcy
of soils as lands are tied morning two demands at the global market this is
what gives rise to the food sovereignty calculator so food sovereignty is
located in this moment in the 1990s la Via Campesina which is a global kind of
peasants organization launched is a food sovereignty contra movement in order to
respond to the neoliberal kind of redefinition of food security right now
I wanted to mention this because this is very important to our project the
agrarian crisis I'm going to come back to food sovereignty and what it entails
in relation to the crisis but a key dimension of the agrarian crisis is this
gendered kind of aspects and specifically you know how the
agriculture was undermined in the neoliberal era it was often men who
would be the ones migrating men it's not like women wouldn't mind me but my base
was very much more dominated women so women would often be left behind right
to kind of remain engaged in agriculture and so agriculture became what we now
underworld and a very prominent South Asian scholar feminist scholar regrets
that he she calls the feminization of Agriculture
increasing proportion of kind of women in the agricultural workforce so
agriculture recently becomes something marked by its feminization now as
there's a lower rating a general problem in terms of accessing subsidies inputs
and extension support any context of austerity
privatization and liberalization this is even more enhanced for women so they
have a harder time even accessing whatever it is still there in terms of
support from the state right so the agrarian crisis we cannot really
understand it without understanding the role that women are playing in
agriculture today right so to redress it one has the central women because
they're an increasing proportion of the workforce and their discrimination is a
key factor and what is potentially keeping the crisis from being addressed
now so to return to food sovereignty as a counter movement articulated response
to this crisis six minutes later so food sovereignty
responds to the neoliberal reformation a few security by insisting that it
doesn't just matter if you have money to purchase food it matters how you get
that food and this matters to multiple reasons cultural spiritually ecological
political reason from equity right Soviet embassy insists no we want
control over our food systems and must be culturally appropriate ecologically
sustainable and gender equality has to be at the center it also puts back on
the agenda land reform which is taken off kind of
in a radical sense but it's not clear to me how that is to be instituted then
really developed that further we're gonna skip this all okay so there's a
big thing I'm going to skin between linking this discussion to the case but
maybe in the in the question of trade we can we can come to that maybe just very
quickly so these four communities this is what they're confronting so the
context they're confronting right and so the project is trying to think how can
we address this sustained kind of ongoing a great crisis through food
sovereignty initiatives led by women and so well and maybe just by talking about
briefly about each of the four cases and the kind of what they're facing
so the first the first one I'm gonna start with is the Sangha and I start
with them because they're literally the first case okay so this project started
with the historian from the University of Victoria doing oral history oral
histories of apartheid and colonization in South Africa what
or how people are responding to it and what she heard from the the women in the
song that community was that they were this particular community was displaced
as recently as 1970 okay so the apartheid regime kind of moved them off
their land and what she was hearing was it was an incredibly traumatic
experience it wasn't just that it did increase the malnutrition in their
community right it did lead to more hardship be moved out there kind of man
and the it was very traumatic they said we felt like we lost a piece of
ourselves we were never able to kind of feel healed after that like and then but
what happened was in post apartheid era in during the transition from apartheid
to post apartheid in the early 1990s in addition to these crises there was a
drought that hit southern Africa and it really really impacted the food security
of this community ready and the post apartheid state supported initiatives
from communities to start growing their own food and so these women started to
farming cooperative and they started savings clubs to support one another and
the name of the garden at the end of building a six hectare garden is called
deed like a tiny garden or the thinking earth and there's already documentary as
we made by members of our team on this that's why they were the first right and
so but the problem one problem our markup on right now is that they're
working on marginal land with very limited resources you know and have
these savings clubs and it seems when I already talked to them they also think
it's kind of absurd that you still have these very wealthy white kind of settler
farms in South Africa and they're being told where the development were kind of
situates them on a six hectare cooperative farm and this is supposed to
be a model a food sovereignty right so a question that Josephine pepper would
often ask is what would it take to break up the big farms like how come we can't
get back our land now the second case I'll talk about is the Palestinians in
Bukhara refugee camp and the reason why move to them second is the Palestinians
became involved in this project because the
a bit vibrant the person who was doing the work in South Africa she screamed
that film in a refugee camp in Jordan and the Palestinians when they were
hearing about the experiences of the song the woman with apartheid and
displacement it really resonated with them so this is also a community and the
people who are working with a McArthur GK actually they are sometimes twice
refugees from 1948 not one right when the when Israel the founding of Israel
expelled 750,000 Palestinians and again in 1968 for 1967 so for you the one you
keep hearing from colors the Palestinian grandmother's who have started through
sovereignty initiatives in Bukhara refugee camp is that we're doing this so
we can return home okay what matters for us is to maintain our relationship to
food from middle eat in the way we always did so our children don't forget
we have similar sort of thing there's a trauma being displaced but is that is
important to heal and again there are cooperatives there's that there's a what
we're looking at is this mill that these grandmother's have begun with this
motivation of mine but also because this is important for the health of the
communities and there are initiatives from microcredit and subsidies that NGOs
go forward there but again I'm wondering what it would mean why why it's why
there are some little scraps that these communities are having to fight over or
beg for so I'm not going to get into the final two this is the wall okay it's the
last one that I want to you I won't do this out from Canada if people have
questions about that but why you are also quite interesting so the way you
are an indigenous community that there again the I don't know how to say that
is that La Guajira
okay so line Waheeda so they live in a kind of desertified
a desert Peninsula in between Colombia and Venezuela and they have been
confronting for the past 30 to 40 years extractivism
the mining of calls their territory and they say each time
they address that they come back they say each time they talk and they get
assurances and this and so why you people in the workshop we're passing it
they were very radical they kept saying this documentary has to be about
addressing the global economic system and then you ask them what that meant
and they'd say brutal couples that could be the language because that's how
they're confronting it right is and these these mines are a mess impact on
the race polluted their waters but it's led to water shortage in combination
with climate crisis and the drought in their area has intensified and with
water shortage they've actually had thousands of children starting to build
in the last decade okay so we know hunger deaths are still a thing but when
you come up and when you encounter its relationship to mining you this way it's
particularly I guess unsettled and so it makes you think about what you're doing
in a project such as this and so what they learn demanding the most is
political mobilization and so I'll kind of skip through this one maybe I'll even
skip through the potential of food sovereignty limitations I guess that I'm
finding is that maybe this is a general problem with development is the purpose
of development to challenge kind of the structure of global capitalism or is it
to stabilize so if it's to stabilize it it's not about contesting power and
seeing it seems to me that in each of these four cases as they as we're
engaging them they be taking up there isn't a means to contest the structural
power that the communities are facing which I guess would require political
mobilization right so how do we as researchers take that up because in this
sense the responsibility means upon the poor and the oppressed they must uplift
themselves but Cargill is never part of our discussions right the mining
companies are never part of these discussions run development it becomes a
responsible ization before so I'm going down right there well I'll leave this
slide up about five minutes question-answer and then I'm just gonna
break so people can be even so y'all can grab some of the snacks from photos
because they're gonna come and take things away but then we really do have a
room till 2:00 so you come up and ask questions and I know there's at least
one Canadian in the room you know Colombia enjoyed it and then Canada so
can you yeah can you just put that into context by Jose in these three problems
sort of more that's a great question right I think I mean that's a limitation
of the presentation today and thinking in terms of development terms or
generally right we do often think about these things separately north and south
so it doesn't fit actually with the hip most talking about it but that's a
problem with the development project it was first world third world and the
position of indigenous peoples didn t be fair to either of us because very often
indigenous communities were themselves act upon by modernizing third world
states I think they would be like the way you the relationship to Colombian
men as well is very interesting right but I think the reason is it's still
resonates like there's a very similar set of struggles to the soaked in
Lourdes banker Island are dealing with long histories of logging companies
coming in they're dealing with being displaced right so they live on us as
you would know in Canada this huge crisis if there's any bigger crisis that
we face I don't know of any indigenous justice for indigenous peoples right
what's happened through the reservations boarding schools and so forth but this
was a community I was dispossessed and displaced many times and what it sought
to make space for luggage and the logging companies are continuing to
impact their bank lives so it's hard for them to get their land back and
contacts so I think you just kind of resonated across but that's that's a
good point I think it does kind of scramble so we had translators we have
so those we had at the workshop we had translators in each of the languages so
some God Arabic and Spanish so that why you were speaking in Spanish not in
their indigenous kind of language and so here we had that was definitely one of
the most interesting parts of the workshop was figuring out how to
constantly be talking into spaces people who don't know I got the same language
we have multiple translators no no so you have the Sangha and their translator
and spend the Y you they'd have a translator the Palestinians when I was
translator and then when you would speak you'd have to wait for all three
translators to translate what you were saying yeah so it was a bit it was it
was really great because it just slows things down you know and there's not so
much we have to say actually you know you can fill up so you can fill up 45
minutes but really you know it's so there was there's an interesting
experience but that's how we yes to which the common language which
translations were be English because of the Canadian honor
because I think it an interesting sight of reflexivity
around language and power did you could it could have just been otherwise it was
like okay everyone is going to translate to why you exactly you would have a
translator in your translator you know what it needs so what happened though
was that so for example if I was speaking the translator was translating
to each of their languages and if a Palestinian is speaking somebody would
translate that into help the translator of the Palestinians would translate that
back into English for the English speakers right but the other translators
were yep so English wasn't it wouldn't go between yeah you're right
no no that's a good point yeah yeah I know no that's that's actually
interesting about reflexivity I guess in terms of how you reproducing
central language it is and I mean that's one reason why I delayed the trip to
Jordan so I could spend a year learning Arabic yeah and you often because of the
issues are on time in your career moving forward these are things you kind of
usually but it does reproduce your mind center and periphery
there's all things you appreciate your life's question
Virginia Tech in the library as well as the question
compressibility engage with this I think is mobility mobility so original
it's not like politically but where we are and include businesses large
dispersive place of food production can't get done talking about whiskey to
grow more food it amendment we think about the complexity of measure but you
can subscribe if we really need social mobility and address construction power
the time energy so we have these
objectives that are you almost have where's the reward system in our in our
space and so when I think this book rainy that awareness for us because it
can we are in fact asking ourselves very close in this world that's a choice you
have to make but then we humbly ask that question more largely as
just sure yeah that's a great question I think
about that more broadly in many ways like when I was hired here last year the
thing that I was really surprised by it was and again I'd been maybe I dictated
not so so you were never not that I'm important how about you never sold for
it but the deeds gonna talk to you now having gone to last year orientations
and hearing this thing always the university has a fundings follow it's
always this point that we have funding Suites funding state funding sleet
especially in liberal arts so what are you doing to get grants well you know
where's a good physical the grass there's these foundations that are
funded by the corporate sector okay and so like the way things are set up is to
kind of keep us away from Austin he's sort of questioned around contesting
said concentrated corporate power and the impacts that has in the global food
system and so the university in the new liberal moment itself which has shifted
right and the space for autonomous research that can ask these questions
it's closing and so the way we've organized our ready place here is vital
to these questions right and like imagine a world in which Virginia Tech
or an institution like this withstand the you know will be able to stand
against for take a very firm stance rather than working to normalize it
stabilize it right but we there's always this assumption there's no other way and
because we because we have forgotten the aggressive shift that happened the
seventies and eighties it was political right to defund universities to defund
public sectors and to assume the best way to access funding it's to let the
corporate sector so whatever cardigan which is so implicated in the Amazon
fires and Rousseau sentiment that was implicated in the imprisonment and the
arrest of the Brazilian workers party's leaders that supported both senado to
met a scientist see that is part of a corporate network called
the Americans that's been doing this for decades which includes Boldman sucks
right now what a car girl comes and says hey we want to fund this program that's
where there was a research that's a good way for me to get funding with the Ford
Foundation is going to come and do this right these are ways that maybe we're
not always aware of how it constrains the questions we ask because it feels
good to do a documentary project like this to uplift the voices but then when
you want to workshop and they're saying hey you're not the first person its
commitment to do this right and what are you doing around anglo-american mining
it keeps coming back and they can buy off politicians and they can hire
paramilitaries and so we build a farm here but our waters still gonna be
polluted by this so I think that that's a really important question about the
forum to which were working here changing that as a real rager so I'm
just gonna give up about formal clothes and I'm gonna say you're welcome to stay
but I know I just like people who need to go on station so thank you all so
much for coming we'll be sending you a short survey
hopefully do put your email on the list and we really beg you to fill them out
we got three responses last time there were 70 people here don't do that just
you can do the quantitative is just real easy one through five and then you can
put a sentence we love this tell big room this but come on yeah you know when
you send out surveys that people are gonna answer me okay I'm just I'm
begging for us and it really helps us you know we do reports and that helps us
to raise money to bring sometimes we bring outside speakers so and that
brings me to you in the video we're having you then capture help us record
this so probably in a couple of weeks a little bit more maybe it'll be online so
you can refer your friends this yeah it's recycling right outside so if you
grab the water bottle there we hope you can join us on Monday we have an extra
special speaker that tells global is bringing in so dr. ammonia from Edgerton
University in Kenya who founded the women in gender development program
there will be speaking she's coming for other events on campus but we got her
for an hour so we're welcome to join us and then we'll have a PhD student in
sociology or poety ranca who's working with our gender development program
she'll be our regular discussion series speaker on November 14th so thank you
all for coming please grab some food so we don't take it all back with us and so
bolos as I think that so thank you all and thanks doctor