farming
Difficult Conditions in a Buid Community
Living conditions are difficult in sitio Danlog, a Buid community in southern Mindoro Island in the Philippines. The frequent violence perpetrated by Filipino soldiers makes it hard for the Buid to maintain their traditionally peaceful lives. According to an article last week in Bulatlat.com, an alternative news source in the Philippines, the Buid and the […]
Amish Farmers Promote Environmental Stewardship
An informal association of farmers along Mill Creek in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County is promoting changes on their properties that are helping improve water quality in the stream. An article published on August 29 in the Bay Journal describes the work of the Mill Creek Preservation Association, most of whose members are Amish. It nicely supplements […]
Developing Gender Equality among the Fipa
Several NGOs in the Rukwa Region of Tanzania have been campaigning recently for their society to promote more gender equality. They are particularly focused on women having better guarantees to the lands they help farm. Several of the villages mentioned last week in a news report about the situation are located in the traditional Fipa […]
The Amish Are Protecting the Land
Five years ago, the Pennsylvania environmental media highlighted the path-breaking efforts of a Lancaster County Amish farmer to protect his soils and the streams near his property from erosion and pollution. The efforts of farmer Raymond King to retard soil erosion, plant in contours, and, more than that, to adopt advanced techniques for protecting the […]
Environmental Degradation and a Plan for Restoration
The territory where the Fipa live in southwestern Tanzania has been designated by the national government as an environmentally sensitive area due to human abuses of the land. Two newspapers, the Tanzania Daily News and The Citizen, both from Dar es Salaam, published reports last week on plans to begin rectifying the situation. The so-called […]
Can Farming Foster Peace?
The agricultural productivity of the Ufipa Plateau in southwestern Tanzania may have helped prompt the Fipa in the region into forming a peaceful society. That was one of the conclusions reached by Roy Willis in his 1989 article “The ‘Peace Puzzle’ in Ufipa.” Because of its intriguing analysis of that society, the article is included […]
Birhors Settle for Growing Crops
Despite the fact that their name for themselves means “men of the forest,” Birhor living in East Singhbhum District of India’s Jharkhand State have started cutting down trees and planting crops. An article released online last Thursday by the Indian environmental biweekly Down to Earth explains that the Birhor and Sabar peoples, who live together […]
Prosperity Increases on Rural Thai Farms [journal article review]
The economic and social characteristics of rural Thailand improved dramatically between 1987 and 2004, according to a recent analysis. In 2004, two researchers gathered data from two different provinces in rural Thailand—one in the Central Plains and the other in the Northeast—in order to make comparisons with 1987 findings from the same two areas. The […]
