Of Questions from Daughters, and Goat Rearing, and WTO

  

My daughter was appalled to know that we are considering goat rearing as a livlihood option for the village people. The people see that as more sustainable in times of water stress. She asked, 'So to save people, you will cause more and more goats to be killed ? People are more important that goats ? '

I first said Yes. Then i said that when the whole world is on a consumerist spree, i cannot moralize to a poor community at a dead end that it should not make a commercial industry of goats. She was not impressed, because I was also not impressed with my own words.

Maybe I will tell her another time, that she may be right and I may be wrong. And that I also do not know whether it is right. That life is only greys as we walk it, and no black or white. And maybe then, as I stop defending indefensibles, she will also think more deeply. And understand that it is not always possible or necessary to defend one's choices. And that sometimes we act in a situation of uncertianity and tentativeness also.

And i will add that we are also looking into pickles and cloth bags and other options, which are what have started as a order from a shop has come.

Swarna Latha Last year, i wrote profiles for a micro-finance NGO to be read by social investors to help with rural livelihoods in remote villages of under-served regions in India. This thought kept nagging the mind. This is a 'viable' livelihood option for village women, in the absence of good enough / decent state support or avenues for employment.

Komakkambedu Himakiran I understand the dilemma; only if goats are killed, will they be birthed. That's a cycle that has evolved over a few millennia, can't disturb that. And yes humans are above other species.

Aparna Krishnan i know - that humans are more important, and that domesticated animals are domesticated animals. And that this reality is not faced will lead to rootless concepts like veganism. . But the question, as i saw it, was also commercial goat rearing as opposed to the traditional goat herders. Or maybe that was my angst, I dont know. She, despite being from a vegetarian family, I think has been comfortable with the hens running around and one day killed when guests come. Or with traditional goat herders on the hill tops with their flock and flute. When the operations become more centralized and commercialized the rural humanity in these processes can disappear.

Komakkambedu Himakiran Survival question these days; market needs meat, if we don't produce, corporates will enter the space. We have to find a composite model of goat/sheep rearing that makes economic sense in this globalized world. Until and unless India gets out of the WTO, we have no other option. Our entire economic policy thought processes are veering toward just importing what was normally produced locally from outside & producing environmentally damaging goods for the Western world here.

Aparna Krishnan Yes, we are trapped. And simpler and humane village systems, under the WTO realities, are maybe a pipe dream. And still one dreams !

Aparna Krishnan WTO has to go.

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• Komakkambedu Himakiran

  Yes, we "develop" by losing our strengths and aping the West.

  

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  • Aparna Krishnan

    We have sold our souls to the devil in the name of modern development. Now we will have to drag gentler souls and communities along, as otherwise they will get trampled to death. I can see it no other way.

    

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• Mark Johnston

  In a monetarised, exploitative system the lives of the children of poor farmers and farm labourers are, unconciously, considered as expendable and worthless as the lives of surplus calves. The small tweaks of green consumerism are not enough to return our societies to the human scale and sustainable vision that Gandhi worked towards.

  

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• Aparna Krishnan

  Modern development, centralization, industrialization, seen dispassionately and honestly, is only getting a stronger and more invincible grip on the world. In 20 years the changes I have seen in my village of which the switch from neemsticks to toothbr… 

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• Aparna Krishnan

  In our village a procedure called Schooling happenned. That is a procedure that is part of Modernity. Those who finish that are equipped with disdain for their traditional skills and lives. They desire only WhiteCollarJobs. In keeping with that reality we are trying to train a community, whose inherited strengths are a vast knowlege of agriculture, in tailoring and trying to source orders. They feel happier at a tailoring machine as it, they feel, is more in line with their SchooledStatus. And we tell ourselves we are BringPracticalAndRealistic. Meantime under the onslaught of ModernScienceAndTechnology in the form of borewells, our groundwater is also over, as is agriculture. To be very honest, I have no idea about why I am doing, what all I am doing. Maybe trying to apply breaks on the juggernaut of modernity ?Or maybe joining modernity.