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cious traditional lands to their creditors and become mere tenants or agricultural workers. In the Philippines, thousands of them have had to leave agriculture altogether and either resort to
small-scale mining or take up contractual jobs in private construction and public works projects in urban areas. In India, some 60,000 peasants, most of them indigenous people, have commit-
ted suicide by ingesting pesticides because they had no alternative to agriculture, and no hope of ever extricating themselves from indebtedness and securing a future for their families.
c. Degradation of land and other natural resources, disruption of ecosystem balance
There are some cases in which indigenous peasants have been able to cope with market glo- balization by taking out bigger loans, intensifying their production and expanding this towards
areas that their communities traditionally conserved as forests. But in overcultivating the land and clearing watersheds, the peasants have been jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of
their production.
Environmental degradation is, how- ever, an old story in the development of
market-integrated agriculture. Pressed to make good in the market – because
otherwise, their families would starve – farmers have long been striving for high-
er and higher yields by means unfriendly to nature.
Farmers have been using fertilizers synthesized from petrochemicals, and
these fertilizers have made the soil acid- ic, less hospitable to the micro-organ-
isms which have helped to maintain its friability and, thus, less cultivable.
As said, farmers have also been monocropping, and this has contributed to nutrient imbalance in the soil as well as allowed pests
to spread more easily and more quickly. To address pest problems, the farmers have been using poisons, also synthesized from petrochemicals. These are indiscriminate killers, and in most
cases, the pests have developed a resistance to the poisons, while the organisms that used to prey upon them have been decimated.
Stronger and stronger poisons have thus been developed by input-producing monopolies. And in recent years, the trend among these monopolies has been towards the development of
pest-resistant crops by means of genetic engineering.
Genetically engineered crops like Bt corn, which carries the DNA of the bacteria Bacillus thuringensis, can kill pests as well as beneficial insects. Meanwhile, their bacteria DNA can trans-
fer to weeds whose extermination would then require the use of powerful herbicides, offsetting the benefit of not having to use insecticides.
Monocropping, the use of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the cultivation of ge- netically engineered crops all threaten the sustainability of farming because they disrupt the
balance in the ecosystem of the farm itself and its environs.
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119 d. Discarding of traditional knowledge and technology, and erosion of indigenous genetic
resources
In adopting the technology of the Green Revolution and that of the “gene revolution”, indige- nous peasants have had to forsake the agricultural knowledge and technology developed by their
predecessors. In clearing forests and monocropping, they have also been eroding biodioversity both on their farms and in the general environment. In all parts of the world where indigenous
peasants have shifted to monocultures, genetic resources important to long-term food security are fast disappearing.
For example, on the Northern Luzon Cordillera in the Philippines, the indigenous peas- ants have bred more than 300 distinct varieties of rice. A number of these varieties originated
from Kabayan in the province of Benguet, and Hungduan and Kiangan in the province of Ifugao. Kabayan, Hungduan and Kiangan seeds were introduced to many areas of the Cordillera through
traditional seed-exchange mechanisms, and they were cross-bred with varieties indigenous to those areas. The resultant breeds now thrive in other parts of Benguet and Ifugao, and in vari-
ous parts of the Mountain Province and Kalinga. But the parent breeds are now difficult to find
in Kabayan, Hungduan and Kiangan because these areas have recently been integrated into the Cordillera’s Vegetable Belt.
Here, the indigenous peasants now plant vegetable seeds supplied to them by local mer- chants, who source these from agro-input monopolies. These are hybrid seeds of temperate-
clime vegetables which have not adapted to the conditions of the tropical pine ecosystem of the Cordillera Vegetable Belt. The crops can survive only with the application of tremendous
amounts of fungicides, herbicides, vermicides and insecticides.
Potato, cabbage, carrot, green bean, snow pea, or iceberg lettuce is monocropped across thousands of hectares. The soil nutrient imbalance created by monocropping is offset by the
application of tremendous amounts of petrochemical fertilizers and chicken dung. But noth- ing can offset the loss of the rich agricultural biodiversity that has inevitably resulted from the
monocropping.
From 2001 to 2003, the peasants of the Cordillera Vegetable Belt were badly affected by the flooding of the Philippine market with cheap vegetable imports, and many wanted to revert to
traditional diversified subsistence production. But they no longer had access to the plant genetic resources they needed and so were stuck with growing crops which they had no certainty of sell-
ing at prices that could cover their huge, high-input production costs. Only the political pressure
that they and their local officials exerted on the national government to curb vegetable importa- tion could save their families from starvation.
e. Departure from traditional values and disruption of customary relations pertaining to land; increased privatization of resources traditionally held in common
The market has been called the great diluter of values. And their integration in it has caused many indigenous people to lose their traditional regard for land as a resource collectively de-
fended and tended, retained and maintained by their communities for the collective survival and well-being of not only the past and the present but also the future generations of these communi-
ties. To those who have completely lost touch with tradition, the land has become like any other commodity in the market – either an object or an instrument of competition between unrelated
individuals or firms. The land and the other natural resources it holds can be appropriated,
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