Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 6 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
In a letter today, John Seymour writes,
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Land, I believe, is the key to all things, and until we wrest land from the hand of the big landlord and make it available to the people who can use it, we can get nowhere. America's Henry George was a great prophet. Borsodi and The School of Living are in this tradition.
Long life to American homesteaders and thanks to the British Seymours!
MILDRED LOOMIS
The School of Living
Freeland, Maryland
June 1973
WHAT IS IT? WHY DO IT?
How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load...
THOREAU
What does being self-supporting mean? Robinson Crusoe, if we except his raft-loads, got pretty near it, and many an African tribesman, or Indian ryot, is not far away. I have lived in African and Indian villages, and have seen a very high degree of self-sufficiency in both, and also a very high degree of happiness and true contentment. In every North Indian village of any use there is a man who knows how to go out into the country and cut down a pipal tree, and with it make a plough to sell to his neighbor in return for wheat or rice or other goods or services. There is a village miller, a dhobi or washerman, a tonga - wallah or driver of a hackney-cart, carpenter and blacksmith, potter, and the people spin their own cotton to give the yarn to the village weaver to weave their cloth. If a man wants to build a house he and his neighbors get to work and build it and that is that. Except at harvest nobody works very hard.
There is one man in each village, though, or very often not in the village but of the village, who does absolutely no good at all, and who is a terrible burden on his fellow villagers, and that is the zamindar —the land-owner. He probably consumes more of the wealth of the village than all of the other villagers put together, and in return for this he does absolutely nothing at all. Remove the zamindar and at one stroke you more than double the wealth and well-being of every other villager.
The Central African village has no zamindar, in fact it has no landowners at all. The concept of land-ownership is completely alien to the African tribesman. The village owns, or at least controls, such of the surrounding forest as it can hold from others, and the villagers till the land in common, each man tilling what seems to the Headman of the village a reasonable amount, and paying nobody any rent for it. The Headman tills (or at least his wives do) the same amount as anybody else, and everybody has enough, and could have more if he wanted it. Here, unless there is a famine (and in twelve years in Africa I never saw one), everybody gets enough to eat, and people who do not hanker after the flesh-pots of the white man live a very good life indeed.
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