Star Wars: The New Alliance

Mange tout and broad beans lucky enough to be in the cushy environs of my polytunnel

In The Grapes of Wrath a family is evicted from their forty acres of farmland in the mid-West of America in the 1930's. As we follow them westwards towards California where they have been led to believe there is plenty of work picking oranges we find that countless thousands of other rural families are doing the same. Vast swathes of land had been sold off, breaking up the small tenanted farms and creating huge ones that were to be farmed by tractor not horse. The promised work of course was scarce and paid pitifully low wages.

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is set in the 1910's and in north-east Scotland but its theme is similar. The tenant crofters there are all farming by horse and plough, growing corn and beet primarily. It is back-breaking toil for the farmers and their children and labourers, but they know and love the land they farm. The protagonist Chris is the bright and well-educated daughter of a farmer but on his death she chooses to stay with the soil rather than leave for the city. But these were the last of the true crofters, tractors were being introduced and farms enlarged.

Agriculture has changed beyond recognition in Scotland and the States since then, but in many other parts of the world men and women are still working the soil in much the same way, running small farms by the sweat of their brow. The food they produce is sometimes exported abroad but much also feeds the local population. In Africa for instance, small farmers feed 70% of the continent's populace. 

A little-publicised aid scheme with the Star-Wars-themed name “New Alliance” is offering aid to Africa in return for changes to the participating nations' laws on seeds, land and trade that benefit big business at the expense of the small-scale farmers. Once the legislation is in place, huge agribusinesses can buy up large tracts of land pushing off the small farming families who had been there, and growing crops for the global market. Echoes of Grapes of Wrath in the 21st century.

Last year over a hundred farmers groups and civil society organisations from African countries and elsewhere called on Western governments to stop supporting the New Alliance. The EU are currently reviewing the scheme so there's a chance for the EU to withdraw their support from it. For more info and what can be done about it, check out this summary from Global Justice Now.

P.S. Apologies for the lack of photos, I forgot to put any on my memory stick to bring to the library. Oops.