Food sovereignty, biopiracy

Beans, Guanuca Market

July 10 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals supported a decision by the Patent and Trademark Office which has positive impacts for Latin American Farmers. This is an interesting story and one which goes to the heart of biopiracy, food sovereignty and the problems inherent in treating everything as a commodity to be “owned” and re-distributed by the highest bidder, first to market, etc…You can read more about the “Enola” bean and the recent ruling by visiting the CIAT web site.

This issue has, of course, been visited previously and there’s a certain maniacal free market madness to  the appropriation of nature and transformation into private property which I don’t understand, at all. The collapse  of any overriding sense of a commons, or atthe very least the willful ignorance of a commons by the economically empowered is a dead end. Again not a new or novel sentiment but worth talking about none the less.

I was reading “Towards Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming autonomous food systems” yesterday and came upon the acronym GURTS which stands for Genetic Use Restriction Technologies. Framing it as a restriction, which terminator seeds/cultivars enforce, makes it intent a bit clearer. (I suppose if I were more consistent in my reading GURTS wouldn’t have jumped out as it already has its own wikipedia page. ) And I was thinking about intent earlier today. Intent related to design more specifically and what the end product (building, technology) can say about the practical theory that lend to the end result.

Theory aside, for now…the picture, while not of yellow beans, was taken at the Guanuca market in Matagalpa and seemed apropos here. I have an enduring fondness for markets and Guanuca is a tremendous maze of things – machetes, beans, tires, plastic sacks and so on. Small vendors, stalls, the ebb and flow of people, noises and smells. And human scale transactions – immediacy of exchange. I always contrast vital markets like Guanuca, or Jean Talon in Montreal, with the sterile, de-humanized transactions occuring in box stores across the world.

So this post has become a little bit muddled…might as well truncate here and hope for increasing clarity.

Exchange, Informal Economies and Poverty – Preliminary Thoughts

Relojeria

Alternative economic configurations have been, much to my surprise, occupying a large part of my thinking of late. I’m trying to weave some sort of sensible fabric out of the chaos of experience I’ve come to call my life and I keep returning to the fundamental nature of economics.

I am, by no means, talking about big scale academic economic theories – my mind is not pliable in a way that lets any of that make sense to me – but rather about human scale economies that we all participate in on a daily basis. I’ve been mapping out my thoughts, trying to organize the fundamental interconnections and relationships. It is a bit like looking up into the night sky and beginning to discern constellations, the trick is not to let the constellations lock into place quite yet but to let the eye or mind travel the pathways of interconnectedness.

So why is this here? Whats the relationship to Nicaragua? It’s one of those possible constellations, I think. There are moments and spaces when/where there is an opening into alternative configurations.  Aging lefty that I am, I still hold the Revolution in high regard. And what the Sandinista’ s tried to do feeds into the conversation  - through multiple pathways.

Other  strands I’m trying to weave into this include solidarity economics, which seems to include many elements I’m concerned with, open source,fair trade, post-scarcity, role of education, science, public good(s), Intellectual Property and more. It is by no means well thought out yet. I’m just coming into some sort of clarity about why it is I’m thinking these things.  It is my intent to work these thoughts out here…to muddle through as best I can and hopefully end up somewhere useful.

Tourist, Documentarian, Voyeur?

When I travel I don’t want to be a tourist, but I am not native. I carry the camera and take pictures – am I then, by definition, a voyeur? What transforms the act of observing, of capturing, from voyeurism to documentary? Thus far, I’ve uploaded the images to flickr, some hang on my walls, I’ve used them in a slideshow…but I don’t think that’s enough. I am still tourista, still the voyeur.

Or does the intent enter into the designation? What was my intent in taking the pictures?

Weaving, fair trade and possibilities

Back to the states after 10 days in Nicaragua. And now to process the experience, think through some of the ideas stirred up by what I saw and felt. Where to begin and how to order what, for now, is a disorganized mass of concepts, ideas and desires?

And so here I am, with fond hopes of typing order into the chaos. Enforcing some words and order on what lays scattered in a journal, my head, scraps and remnants and images.