Bush Foods-Plants – Knowing your rights

Respect for traditional knowledge and cultural rights to them is integral to bush plant based initiatives. There are a number of organizations who are doing good work in this space. A range of useful information resources are also available to help you to better understand and to address what’s involved if you and your community are looking at developing bush plant based initiatives, or are being contacted by people about information that Elders and other community members in your community may hold.

The CRC for Remote Economic Participation portfolio of projects includes the project “Plant Business”. … This project will also create commercialisation models that return greater equity share value to Aboriginal people for the genetic resources that are used commercially.

…the Aboriginal Bush Traders Bush Harvest Project conducted by Aboriginal Bush Traders have developed three valuable booklets that were released in mid March. They are:

1. Knowing your rights to your Aboriginal Plant Knowledge – which provides Aboriginal knowledge holders an overview of what people need to consider when developing Plant based products.

2. An Analysis of Indigenous Body Products and Markets

3. A Support Manual – which has detailed information in regard to product development, legislative requirements, labeling and quality control. To obtain a PDF copy of the booklets email bushharvest@aboriginalbushtraders.com

via Bush Foods-Plants – Knowing your rights, from RIG News #12 | Remote Indigenous Gardens)

In case this needs clarification: RIG = Remote Indigenous Gardens network Australia. Generally, there isn’t much [any, negative] money in community gardening, but they act as a network for Aboriginal Australians who either retain traditional ownership of lands, or don’t but are engaged in creating community gardens and/or work on issues around native species and intellectual property.

occupyallstreets:

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Children As Young As Six Harvest 25 Percent of U.S. Crops

Knowing the farmer who grows your food has become an important tenet of the modern food movement, but precious little attention is paid to the people who actually pick the crops or “process” the chickens or fillet the fish. U Roberto Romano’s poignant film, The Harvest/La Cosecha (2011), being screened across the country for Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-29), informs us that nearly 500,000 children as young as six harvest up to 25 percent of all crops in the United States.

What’s illegal in most countries is permitted here. Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.

This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.

Children earn about $1,000 per year for working an average of 30 hours a week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When you consider that the average annual pay for a migrant family of four is $12,500-$14,500, it’s apparent why some families feel they have no choice but to bring their children into the fields with them. Half of these kids will not graduate from high school because they’re always moving around, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that caused them to be day laborers in the first place.

Read More

so much about this!

eta: i don’t wanna tag this class, rather than labour, migrant etc

Being back in food security- peasant-farm networks for the 1st time since I was a kid in a [white, australian] farmhand family, is really prompting clarity on how argrian class is it’s own type of class, distinct from - and usually the poor, browner cousin of - much of what online type class talk is about. 

And it’s at different stages in various countries to - depending whether the country is collapsing back into feudalism or hardly ever left or still has large peasant populations.

so of course it’s about migration or at least race [depending on where]. and, if not exactly the popular image of slavery, at least about families of landless peasant status working in entire economies where no one takes for granted the wealthier white nations benchmarks of class with citizen benefits & urban post-industrialized consumerism.

Marxism has such focus on definition, on being able to stage ‘war’ while ultimately remaining secure within a very industrialized, politically stable, unstated white, culturally homogenous, and family politics invisible framework. Which was never true for Marxists realities either, to be fair.

But there is a sense, to class warriors in western white societies since, that society just exists, classes are layers within it and the issue is fighting for a piece of the pie with room for only one true class champion [you don’t want to be too high, or to low, in Marx’s moral code].

Which leaves little room for the agrarian working poor who even his class warriors prefer to undervalue. Especially if they’re also migrants, especially if they’re also working as whole families not ‘male adult ideal labour subjects’.

They can’t avoid exposing the contradictions of western white Marxist type ‘class warriors’. They challenge not just class, but the single issue class warriors whole assumptions about western society just existing in the background of their class war, by simply existing themselves. They live extremely hard working poverty that’s less lumpenprole, than a limbo labour state between multiple unstable economies and unwelcoming societies.

Some people online think that just looking at this with also race politics, also rural politics, also whichever politics until you got your intersectional checklists covered - addresses this. but it doesn’t automatically.

because I see plenty people doing that, like trying to copy one of the WOC who is good at it, still using class like it can only mean the Marx kind. Then still getting angry at the person for having contractions in their argrarian experience. Or saying they get it, then minimizing how that particular farm labour childhood shapes education, status, expectations, social norms etc. - based on their experiences as urban marginal poor.

So they still do things like judging these parents with ‘the simple solution is for them to not work - any parent who would allow this is wrong’ . Which, aside from being impractical - is promoting a notion about who can be proud of their family, and their labours, which is imo hard for some kids to reconcille when they do grow up.

i wonder if this is why even the ones who have or get citizenship, then get the scholarships, have trouble with ambition.  Like lots of ethical conflict, and social anxiety about work, and the ties you’d have to make for social mobility to sustain that work.

this is rambling. as always there’s more to make sense of than i think i can articulate well.

eta2: why is it called whistleblow, who are you meant to blow the whistle on? Yourself, if you eat? I loved unionism and what ‘class war’ i was able to accomplish doing it but…bloody class warriors and not dealing with farm labour. 

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days? Would you give that person some food?

Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live. Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America. Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become “out of reach” for most average people.

Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the “health risks” of the food being distributed by ordinary “do-gooders”. Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed.

But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting? This is just another example that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks. There seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care of everyone and that nobody else should even try.

via Feeding The Homeless BANNED In Major Cities All Over America

I’m sure some ppl. will point out the journalistic bias of this. I will point out the power dynamic bias, and assuming people can’t interpret news for themselves, bias in such feedback.

The importance of the body in this equation cannot be overlooked. The body shows me decay (or growth) where I most fear it. Ultimately, my body is simply a map of where I’ve come from. Quite literally, it is the trail of my electrons coursing, racing, and whirling through space - what my eyes see is the trace of where they’ve been. I ran ten miles; I ate wheat; I skinned my knees, and experienced pleasure, pain, love, and birth. My body remembers all of these things, even when I am not reflecting on them.  The body remembers experiences once endured and actions once taken, things I am capable of because I have once done them.

This is why recognizing ourselves as beautiful is in some ways more powerful than recognizing that we can be “good”. To love my body is to reconcile with where I have been and thus what I am capable of. By appreciating myself, and what I capable of, and hence knowing the roads I don’t take in spite of that capability, only then does my current action became a choice. Only then may it be called good or bad. Without choice, judgement has no value. It is meaningless to call something “good” or “bad” that simply is. Only that which is chosen can be said to be chosen out of compassion or cruelty.

Thus,recognizing that our bodies are beautiful becomes a powerfully political act, a celebration of compassion directed toward the self. And this is what is behind the Black woman’s love of her body, which is so present in the ethos of contemporary Black culture. It is imperative that we love our own bodies *and* that we love other’s bodies in their diversity. Ultimately, loving people for who they are should never be about disregarding the body - but about embracing it.

Journey Toward Compassionate Choice: Intergrating Vegan and Sistah Experience.
By Tara Sophia Bahna-James in the Sistah Vegan anthology by Breeze Harper. 

Thanatopolitics and the deepening crisis of capitalism

“The markets are not working” and “capitalism is self-destructing.” This is the message from the mainstream economist, Dr. Nouriel Roubini, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, the antidote to this class war is a movement of the multitude - of the 90 percent of us that work for a wage, are unemployed, poor, homeless, displaced, and dispossessed; and who do not own capital but are the direct material and immaterial living labor source of the wealth appropriated by corporations as profiteering excess and hyper-speculation in the commodification of risk.

The so-called excess capacity Roubini refers to is really a code word for “let them eat mud pies,” like the displaced Haitians have done since the 2010 earthquake that we so quickly forgot.

This crisis is capital’s death march against the multitude: It is thanatopolitics: a direct attack on our ability to live. We face the prospect of mass extinctions of entire multitudes of human beings from climate change and other ravages unleashed by capital’s second contradiction: The tendency to destroy the very natural conditions that are the basis of our collective existence.

- August 2011