http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/tehuacan-divining-destiny/ Reporting the Global Water Crisis Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:22:57 +0000 hourly 1 http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/tehuacan-divining-destiny/comment-page-1/#comment-10107 David Barkin Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:10:59 +0000 http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/?p=6422#comment-10107 While this report offers some limited information about two different worlds co-existing in current day Mexico, it is framed in such a way as to mislead the reader and confuse issues, motivations, people's roles and the underlying causes. The problems start with minor errors like identifying the statement by Raul (NOT Reoel) Hernández as "General", or more serious ones that suggest the inability of Mexico's peasants to produce corn (In fact, the country is self-sufficient in white and colored corns required for human consumption; Nafta effectively made imports of US corn used for industrial proccesses and animal feed less expensive) -- to not continue. However, by jumping from the vignettes of Alternativas' actions to the contamination and poor water management systems created by the political system, the author has done a terrible disservice to an understanding of the situation. Alternativas is a NGO model that has successfully stimulated the emergence of a complex industrial and cooperative system of production benefiting more than 100,000 people in more than 100 villages joined in a politically interesting model of alliances that merits explanation (I won’t do that here-I have done this elsewhere). In contrast, the rest of the article describes a pattern of technical incompetence, lack of political will, corruption and, perhaps more tellingly for your audience, lack of capacity of the US-based "anti-sweatshop" campaign to actually obtain compliance with headquarters commitments of the transnational garment industry firms contracting with local politically important bosses in Mexico. To end this synthetic comment, I simply add that the problem that Mexico faces in this regard is not one of water shortage but rather of erroneous choices of technologies, misplaced priorities and a political model based on serving the interests of wealthy and powerful and assumptions that the people are the problem rather than the solution. While this report offers some limited information about two different worlds co-existing in current day Mexico, it is framed in such a way as to mislead the reader and confuse issues, motivations, people’s roles and the underlying causes. The problems start with minor errors like identifying the statement by Raul (NOT Reoel) Hernández as “General”, or more serious ones that suggest the inability of Mexico’s peasants to produce corn (In fact, the country is self-sufficient in white and colored corns required for human consumption; Nafta effectively made imports of US corn used for industrial proccesses and animal feed less expensive) — to not continue.
However, by jumping from the vignettes of Alternativas’ actions to the contamination and poor water management systems created by the political system, the author has done a terrible disservice to an understanding of the situation. Alternativas is a NGO model that has successfully stimulated the emergence of a complex industrial and cooperative system of production benefiting more than 100,000 people in more than 100 villages joined in a politically interesting model of alliances that merits explanation (I won’t do that here-I have done this elsewhere).
In contrast, the rest of the article describes a pattern of technical incompetence, lack of political will, corruption and, perhaps more tellingly for your audience, lack of capacity of the US-based “anti-sweatshop” campaign to actually obtain compliance with headquarters commitments of the transnational garment industry firms contracting with local politically important bosses in Mexico. To end this synthetic comment, I simply add that the problem that Mexico faces in this regard is not one of water shortage but rather of erroneous choices of technologies, misplaced priorities and a political model based on serving the interests of wealthy and powerful and assumptions that the people are the problem rather than the solution.

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