Daily Archives: February 22, 2021

Despina Stratigakos, vice provost for inclusive excellence and professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, has been named to the board of directors of the Martin House.

Frank Lloyd Wrights Martin House, designed and built from 1903-05, is considered by Wright scholars to be a significant turning point in the evolution of Wrights Prairie house concept. The National Historic Landmark is located in the Parkside neighborhood of Buffalo.

An architectural historian, Stratigakos conducts research that explores how power and ideology function in architecture, whether in the creation of domestic spaces or world empires.

She is the author of four books. Hitlers Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020) examines how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to construct a model Aryan society in Norway during World War II. Where Are the Women Architects?(2016) confronts the challenges women face in the architectural profession.Hitler at Home(2015) investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Fhrers domesticity.A Womens Berlin: Building the Modern City(2008) traces the history of a forgotten female metropolis. It won the German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize and the Milka Bliznakov Prize.

Stratigakos has served as a director of the Society of Architectural Historians, an adviser of the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech and as a trustee of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

She has taken part in Buffalos municipal task force for Diversity in Architecture, and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy and academic excellence.

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Stratigakos named to Martin House board - UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University at Buffalo Reporter

Ikea research lab ponders the future of the ideal city

Space10 Ikeasresearch and design lab in Copenhagen has teamed up with publisherGestalten to create a book that explores a better urban environment for humanitys future

The Ideal City is a new book from Space10, the Swedish furniture giant Ikeas own R&D lab, based in Copenhagen. A compilation of best practice from around the world 53 cities in 30 countries the thrust of the book is to capture urban projects that are striving to make a difference, gently but inexorably steering towards the impossible goal of utopia. As a result, theres a welcome thread of positivity running through the pages, perhaps unsurprising when you consider how much of a positive spin Ikea has managed to place on the prosaic art of furniture making.

The project run from public toilets to new parks, urban farms, food provision, even prisons and wholescale city district regeneration. Divided into five focal areas The Resourceful City, The Accessible City, The Shared City, The Safe City and The Desirable City the book includes projects and proposals from featured architects such asSelgasCano, Naruse Inokuma Architects, Gustafson Porter + Bowman, and Urban-Think Tank, along with a host of thinkers and theorists.

Photography:Anne-Sophie Rosenvinge

The topics cover all the key talking points of our age, from closed-loop energy systems to more walkable, accessible and diverse urban spaces. As architect Bjarke Ingels describes it, true utopia might be impossible, but that doesnt stop designers from ensuring that each time they design a little fragment of the world [you have to make it] more like the way you wish the world to be.

Many of the featured projects follow the now-familiar format of a focal point designed to act as an exemplar and generator of socially progressive ideas, whether its a place of worship, a community market, a bike park or public seating.

The book goes further by talking to planners and entrepreneurs, highlighting the uneasy relationship between public and private that makes progress so unpredictable. Youll come away from these pages realising that although design leadership is never in question, whats needed most is political will. Without economic and legislative building blocks, a new social contract will struggle to take shape.

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Ikea research lab ponders the future of the ideal city - Wallpaper*

To quench the pandemic-inspired hunger for travels, our columnist invites readers to visit some of the worlds quirkiest places, made special by technology.

Not being able to travel for nearly a year due to the persisting Covid-19 pandemic is starting to slowly but surely affect my sanity (excessive use of the split infinitive is one of the first symptoms, or so I hear).

That is why I was thrilled to be approached recently by a Berlin-based international publisher with an offer to compile an atlas of the worlds oddest places. As a former QI elf (yes, I worked on that popular TV programme as a writer/researcher some years ago), I can confess to being an avid collector of geopolitical, technological and other oddities, so the publisher did his own research well.

In Mafia speak, it was indeed an offer I could not refuse.

Currently in the midst of going through my copious notes and archives, I am still not sure what to include. So to somewhat quench (another split infinitive I did warn you!) the pandemic-whipped hunger for travel, allow me to introduce just three of the potential 100 entries made odd by technology/ies.

The worlds smallest national railway network, the Vatican Railway, is a short stretch of track that connects the states only station with one just outside the Vatican walls in Rome. It was once used to transport Popes dead and alive but in recent years it has, thanks to the papal plane, been relegated to freight runs, bringing goods from Italy into the Vatican.

The Vatican Railway system is the shortest in the world: line length, 0.68km; track length, 1.19km. It has two tracks, but only one station and one platform. Passengers traverse a mere 624m on their voyage from the Vatican station to Roma-San Pietro.

The Vatican Railway operates just one passenger train per week, on Saturday mornings, and an occasional freight train.

The Papal States grand train station was constructed between 1929 and 1933 and decorated with the expectation that it would be used by Popes and VIPs. Three popes have indeed used the Vatican Railway, four if you count the fact that Pope John XXIII had the relics of Pope Pius X transported to Venice via train from the Vatican.

The incumbent Pope Francis himself has not yet taken a train from the Vatican Station. However, in 2014, he welcomed 500 children who travelled by train to the Vatican from Naples as part of a care programme for socially deprived children.

For comparison, the worlds longest railway network, with an operating route over 250,000km long, is in the USA. The second longest, at 100,000km, is in China, while the third longest, in Russia, measures 85,000km.

The South Australian town of Coober Pedy is the worlds only town situated entirely underground. Aptly enough, Coober Pedy is an Aboriginal expression thought to translate as white man in a hole.

Millions of years ago, the whole Australian continent was submerged by the ocean. When it receded, minerals from the seabed filled cracks in the earth and created colourful opals. Coober Pedy is part of the Great Artesian Basin, renowned as the opal-mining capital of the world. What began in 1916 with the arrival of the first adventure-seeking miners, soon evolved into the worlds largest opal-mining operation.

Coober Pedy residents began turning discarded opal mines into permanent dugouts to escape the oppressive heat. That is why, despite being home to around 2,500 residents, the town has an eerie, almost otherworldly feel to it.

Entire bookshops, churches and bars are installed in the towns carved underground walls and, after years of living in these dugouts, the folks who call them home have no plans of leaving.

The underground dwellings have all the traditional amenities internet access, electricity, and water. The only difference between normal homes and those in Coober Pedy is that the latter never see daylight.

A word of warning based on personal experience: visitors need to watch their step especially at night to avoid falling through the ground or bumping into mining equipment and abandoned vehicles scattered around the town!

In 1927, Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer and then the richest man in the world, bought a 3,900-square-mile patch of the forest in the Brazilian Amazon. His intentionwas to grow rubber fortyres, but the project rapidlyevolved into a more ambitious Utopian bid. Ford temporarily succeeded in constructing an American-style town, which he wanted inhabited by Brazilians hewing to what he considered American values. Workers wereaccommodated in good-quality clapboard bungalows, some of which are still there now. Streetlamps illuminated concrete sidewalks lined with warehouses and dance halls.

In his efforts to build a new American Utopia, Ford forbade consumption of alcohol on the site while promoting gardening, square dancing and readings ofpoetry. Special sanitation squads patrolled the outpost, killing stray dogs, draining puddles of water where malaria-transmitting mosquitoes could multiply, and checking employees for venereal diseases.

Alas, Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, despite the best intentions of its founder, soon became the site of an environmental and social disaster. Although many fine buildings were constructed, in the plantations, the trees were planted too closely and therefore suffered from all sorts of diseases. No rubber was produced.

The site which, significantly and unlike this writer, Ford himself never visited was returned to Brazil in 1945.

Fordlandia these days is not quite a ghost town, but home to nearly 2,000 descendants of Fords plantation workers, now mostly employed in farming. Some of them live in the crumbling, yet surprisingly sturdy, structures built nearly a century ago.

Have you visited any places (towns, areas, countries) made odd or special by technology? Letus know at engtechmag@theiet.org with 'After All' in the subject line.

The Bumper Book of Vitalis Travels Thirty Years of Globe-Trotting by Vitali Vitaliev is published by Thrust Books.

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After All: From my collection of techno oddities you never knew existed - E&T Magazine

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, titled, Theres One Big Problem With Electric Cars, the author argued that the switch to electric cars is an improvement, but doesnt solve many of the problems that all cars cause, regardless of what they run on. They take up a lot of space, both on roads and elsewhere in cities. They sit unused most of the time, and their parking spaces alone eat up a lot of room in cities, and that room may be put to better use. Theres also a lot of death and destruction associated with cars, with over a million dying globally every year in crashes.

The main point was that instead of switching cars to electric, we should be pushing society away from cars toward alternatives, like transit, to solve the problems he laid out.

My first reaction was to raise the problem of realpolitik, which the author did partially get into. People are at least willing to change from a gasoline car to an electric car because it doesnt totally upend a big chunk of their life that was built around cars. Neighborhoods, cities, jobs, and many other things are all built around cars, and people dont like that feeling that their life, which they worked their butts off to get together, is changing out from under them.

Even changing fuels is controversial and hard to get people to do, and might be barely achievable over a decade or two. Pushing for something even more fundamental like getting cars out of cities is likely to be a non-starter, so wasting energy on that instead of what people would be more willing to do might keep any kind of change from happening.

As Otto von Bismarck said, Politics is the art of the possible. Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good isnt a good way to get anything done.

As I thought about it more, I dont think the premise of the piece is very sound. Getting rid of cars might not actually be a better outcome.

Disasters and Emergencies

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic showed us that a world powered mostly by mass transit wouldnt be the utopia some people think it is. With enclosed spaces, dozens or hundreds of people sharing the same air, and tight quarters that preclude social distancing, trains, subways, and buses are efficient but arent that compatible with life during a pandemic.

Eventually things will go back to normal, but theres no way this is the last pandemic we will ever face. Even if we avoid something this bad happening for another 100 years, we dont want to compound the problem with 100 years of collectivist transportation monoculture. If there arent any Ubers or car lanes the next time we get into this kind of crisis, the only remaining alternative will be bikes and scooters (assuming the government should run everything scolds dont ban dangerous e-bikes in favor of transit, too).

The pandemic cant be the only kind of black swan that would cripple us if we became overly reliant on transit for everything. Texas got shellacked this past week because they assumed that the kind of winter weather they got wouldnt happen often enough to matter, so wed better take a look at all of our assumptions before we get rid of cars and other privately-controlled forms of transportation. What could possibly go wrong? is a question we should be answering, not taking rhetorically.

Cities Dont Exist In A Vacuum

But lets take that scary disaster stuff off the table for a minute and assume that nothing goes wrong. Urban people could be better off without cars taking up so much room. Thered be more room for pedestrians, micromobility, and even housing without traffic lanes and parking lots/garages taking up all that space, right?

The problem is that cities are usually ringed by suburbs, which then give way to an archipelago of exurbs before youre back in the wilderness. What about all the people near the city but not in its core? I guess you could beef up transit in those places, too, and even beef up transit between suburbs and exurbs, but that would only happen at great cost. We are already decades if not a century into sprawl development in most places, and idealism cant provide us with a Ctrl+Z solution unless someone invents the flux capacitor.

The Urban-Rural Divide

Even worse, its not good to have rural people and people in small towns speaking completely different transportation languages. That only deepens the urban-rural divide. In theory, people visiting the city from a small town could park in a garage or lot at the edge of the urban core, but youre imposing an extra fee for outsiders, and discouraging them from interacting with the city. People living in the city, not having cars, would have a greater expense when they want to go visit the countryside, and theyd naturally do less of that.

The political problems and impasses that separate urban populations from rural populations are already bad enough now without imposing what would basically be a toll or tax on anyone trying to cross the urban-rural divide. I know Reagan isnt popular with environmentalists, but he was right when he said you get less of the things you put a tax on.

If we put roadblocks on the bridges crossing the urban-rural divide, we risk more political drama at best and war at worst in the long run.

Ive seen some people (not the author Im responding to) suggest that nearly everyone just be moved into cities to protect nature and for other reasons. The Chinese government has actually been doing this, against rural peoples wishes, for years. They force people to move, bulldoze the small settlements and towns (some of which have existed across multiple ancient dynasties), and move everyone into multi-story dwellings. The goal is to make everything more efficient, provide more opportunities for the people theyre moving, and help spur domestic economic demand to make China economically stronger.

The reality isnt as rosy as they had hoped. Moving that many people that fast has led to struggles with building infrastructure, housing, and even providing jobs for the new residents that pay enough for them to afford to live in the city.

Theres also the mental health issue nobody wants to talk about.

The fact is, humans didnt evolve in cities, and we dont cope very well with our disconnection from nature. Need some proof? Just look at what happened to many people after watching Avatar (the 2009 film). After seeing a realistic, three dimensional view of a beautiful jungle paradise, some fans couldnt cope very well with returning to a normal life on earth in a synthetic and engineered city.

When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed gray. It was like my whole life, everything Ive done and worked for, lost its meaning, one viewer wrote in an online forum. It just seems so meaningless. I still dont really see any reason to keep doing things at all. I live in a dying world.

Its not just a VR version of the post-vacation blues. Human populations passed 50% living in cities a decade ago, and the frightening truth is that we dont know how well thats going to work. A well-established body of research shows that humans have a need to be connected to nature. There are a number of psychological and even physical ailments that people suffer because weve been removed from the environment in which humanity evolved. It has even been shown that patients recovering from surgeries recover faster when they have a window with a view of trees instead of a brick wall, and prisoners are less prone to violence and conflict when theres some nature introduced into the prisons.

Instead of vilifying sprawl and those who decide to move to the suburbs, maybe we should treat cities the same way the NYT op-ed treats cars. Maybe instead of concluding that cars should go away because theyre bad for cities, we should question whether cities are the right way forward for humanity itself.

I know we will never abolish cities, or move all people into them, but we should be looking for ways to mix mankind with nature more for our well being. We may even consider reducing density, and having people work remotely from smaller towns and even rural areas. Just like we need a healthy balance of cars and other forms of transportation in cities, we need a healthy balance of the urban and the rural in our lives.

Cars can be a good part of that solution, especially when theyre electric and dont contribute to the destruction of nature as much as other kinds of cars.

Featured image: My Nissan LEAF out in nature at the Painted Desert in the Petrified Forest National Park.

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There Are Many Big Problems With Getting Rid Of Cars - CleanTechnica

Twenty-five years ago, late Subcommander Insurgent Marcos from the EZLN, described globalisation as a war against humanity. HisSeven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle(1997) pictured several dimensions of this war including the omnipresence and omnipotence of money. Today the war against humanity has reached a point of no return. Crises are inherent to the fabric of capitalism. Through crises, capital renews itself to continue self-expanding. The problem that we face is not the 1% of greedy capitalists standing against the 99% of the world. Rather, this ill-conceived idea of the Occupy Wall Street movement prevents us from understanding that the problem we have to confront is that capitalism is an (im)possible project, i.e. a system that has colonised human and non-human life to the point of self-destruction.

Recently, USA based best-seller authors, such as Rutger Bregman inUtopia for Realistsand Peter Frase inFour Futures, proposed that the project for the left should be based on a massive redistribution of money (cash transfers/ universal basic income), together with full automation. What a big mistake! Let us be clear: money, as means of exchange, existed before capitalism. But it is only in capitalism that money becomes a form of existence of human practice. To get rid of money as means of exchange will not do either. As the old mole demonstrated a century and a half ago, the most important feature of (colonial, patriarchal) capitalism is not to put people to work and exploit them in the workplace (although this is essential), but to secure the subordination of the human and non-human life to money, sustained by the separation between the producers and the means of production as the precondition for its existence (Dinerstein and Pitts). Money is not a simple mediation in market transactions: it is the most abstract expression of capitalist property and hence the supreme social power through which human social reproduction is subordinated to the power of capital (Clarke).

My question to those who want to distribute money is: How is this going to solve the problem of the central role of money in the subordination of life to the power of capital, and the violence, cruelty and misery it creates?

Todays crisis is a crisis of the social reproduction of human and no-human life, with its ecological, political, financial, economic, energy, food and environmental forms of expression. The solution to the crisis is in the hands of those who are struggling in rural communities, in the city, in the harbour, in the jungle: they constitute the seventh piece of the jigsaw puzzle in Marcos analysis: the pockets of resistance against the empire of financial pockets. Grassroots organising is expanding and has a chief role in the creation of alternative forms of social life to the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist one.

The process of creation of alternatives brought back the depreciated idea of utopia in a new light without becoming utopianist. Grassroot movements, collectives, and communities have freed utopia from the heavy ideological prison and party politics burden and embrace, instead, a concrete utopia based on a praxis-oriented activity. Concrete utopias have left behind the abstract project of a dreamed society by the political Avant guard to be realised in the future. Instead, they are opening spaces (pockets) from where to enunciate and articulate new concrete realities in the present. They are utopian because their praxis denaturalise capitalist society by operating within the dimension of the not yet reality that awaits in the interstices of the present reality to be anticipated. This process is driven by hope as political praxis and resistance, rather than wish, passive expectation, religion, or fantasy.

Alternativesengage with possibility. To speak the language of possibility is not nave: the world is open, unclosed, wrote Ernst Bloch, and possibility is not a mental creation but exists in the material texture of the world. Possibility is not the same as Probability. Most of the things we dream of are not probable because there is no objective evidence or established conditions for them to emerge. But can we dare to say that to eliminate hunger in the world is impossible? Clearly not. All we can say is that it is not probable right now, but it could be possible. We cannot rule things a priori because we have not imagined them yet. It was unimaginable and improbable that the indigenous communities of Chiapas would have produced a global revolution. The Zapatista uprising demonstrated that it was possible. The Zapatistas revolutionary movement that represents the voice of indigenous people of Chiapas, Southeast Mexico. They came to light on January 1, 1994, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) occupied several counties of Chiapas, an economic strategic area where abundant natural resources (biodiversity, oil, waterfalls) coexist with extreme poverty and social exclusion. The entrance of the Mexican state to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) demanded a reform of Article 27 of the National Constitution which would facilitate the opening up of indigenous lands (ejidos) to large agrobusiness. On January 1, 1994, the first day of NAFTA, the Chiapas peasants, represented by the EZLN ski-masked leaders, exclaimed Enough is enough! (Ya basta!), declaring war on the Mexican state and characterizing globalization as a war against humanity.

The idea of the alternative must be problematised rather than romanticised. The alternative is not simply the enactment of an ideal society but a complex process of struggle towards dignified life. They begin with an -implicit or explicit NO, like the Zapatistas Ya Basta! To say NO is a very important step but it is not enough. Every no, writes Bloch, contains at the same time a dangerous and battle-worthy Yes. (Bloch).

The process of communising, inventing, exploring, creating and contradicting collectively is affirmative in the sense that it shields life in a non-religious and non-transcendental manner. We are here to live, and to live with dignity. As critical affirmations, alternatives are not positive or optimistic. Rather, they constitute an advanced form of negation that has progressed from saying NO to the enunciation of a new reality. But critical affirmations are always at risk of being obliterated. Hope is not safe, secured, says Bloch. It entails risk and danger. This risk is created by multiple contradictions that emerge in the process, internal and external, individual, organisational, collective cultural and political. The art of organising hope emerges from within capitalism and stands with, against, and beyond the state, the law, money, etc. As the political form of capital, the state is genetically designed to create order; its managers endeavour to subordinate resistance to a historically specific form of order by either obliterating it by force or by translating our struggles into something else that befits the grammar of the state order, via policy, money, and legislation. In the process, the radical anticipatory and prefigurative elements of the alternative, usually are lost in translation, although legislation passed as a response to a process of mobilisation can create a better situation (e.g. the recent achievement of legal abortion in Argentina), and therefore enable us to be in a better position to continue the struggle beyond capitalism.

But this is not the end of it. As we navigate contradictions collectively, we produce a surplus possibility that we must cherish, nourish and expand. The idea of defeat prevents us from capturing this incredible dimension of the art of organising hope. We must find another way to process disappointment and identify the content of surplus possibilities (excess). Then, we will stop worrying about what the state will do; we already know the answer to this, and shift focus onto theuntranslatablepossibilities that we are creating: the signs, ideas, experiences, horizons, practices and projects that are beyond the state reality, that exist in a beyond zone of an alternative praxis and therefore cannot be recuperated and integrated by the state.

This means that we will produce a different way of measuring success, considering how alternatives challenge the systems, ways of doing, classifying and naming, thinking, etc. As Icaza and Vazquez put it clearly, these struggles are epistemic struggles, so they cannot be adequately understood through the rationality that underlies the processes they want to break and therefore, we must read social struggles as open questions to the dominant ways of thinking and ordering the real.

Bloch, E. (1959/1986). The Principle of Hope Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Clarke, S. (1988). Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the state, Aldershot, Edward Elgar.

Dinerstein, A. C. (2015). The politics of autonomy in Latin America: The art of organising hope, Basingstoke, Palgrave McMillan.

Dinerstein A.C. and H. Pitts (2021) A world beyond work? Money, Labour and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia, Emerald, Society Now Series, London,

Icaza, R. and Vzquez, R. (2013) Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles, Development and Change, 44(3), pp. 683704.

Levitas, R. (1997) Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia. In Daniel, J.O. and Moylan, T. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, London and New York: Verso), pp. 6579.

Levy, Z. (1997) Utopia and Reality in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. In Daniel, J.O. and Moylan, T. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, London and New York: Verso, pp. 175185.

Teaser photo credit: Sign of the entering Zapatista autonomous territory:North Zone. Board of Good Governance. Strictly prohibited: The trafficking of arms, planting and consumption of drugs, intoxicating drinks, illegal sale of wood, and the destruction of nature. Zapata lives, the fight continues You are in rebellious Zapatista territory. Here the people rule the government obeys. By Matthew T Rader, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88956310

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The power of the Alternative - Resilience

New Delhi: Citing damning examples of Reagan era policies that have led to irreparable damage to the USs farmers, 87 farmers unions in the country have extended solidarity to the ongoing protests by farmers in India.

In a strong letter, the organisations draw a sharp connection between how agriculture has been affected by forces of neoliberalism in both India and the US. The unions began the letter by quoting Ghazipur protester Ringhu Yaspal, who says, Agriculture has turned into a slow poison. Its better to die fighting here.

The unions called the ongoing protests at Delhis borders one of the worlds most vibrant protests in history.

Their rallying cry is to repeal the three unjust laws that were passed without their knowledge or consultation. We extend our solidarity to countless farmers who are peacefully and boldly standing up for their rights and dignity, with other farmers from across the globe.

One of the key demands of the movement is for farmers to receive a Minimum Support Price (MSP) currently assured for just a few crops for all produce, including vegetables, the unions note.

The unions extol the virtues of MSP, noting that it is a key price signal to other traders, and ensures that farmers receive a fair price for crops.

A security person keeps vigil near barbed barricades at Ghazipur border during the ongoing farmers protest. Photo: PTI

Notably, the unions recognise the role of the US government in creating the current imbroglio.

The US has been a key opponent of Indias limited use of MSP at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The US, with Australia, Canada and European allies, has claimed that Indias MSP distorts trade.

In a two-part analysis forThe Wire,Indra Sekhar Singh had essayed the after-effects of US policies on agri-business and the model India has sought to follow with these farm laws.

The unions also exhorted the Biden administration to make agricultural policies conducive to farmers.

While the U.S. agricultural sector receives inordinately large support compared to many countries, access to that support remains inequitable. In particular, Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian-Pacific and other people of color producers, who lack secure land tenure and are concentrated in vegetable and small-scale cattle sectors, have been excluded historically. Support flows to larger agribusiness farming operations instead of the independent family farmers whose voices we amplify.

The unions note that it is their understanding that what Indian farmers are enduring now happened in the US almost four decades ago.

Reagan era furthered the farm crisis through deliberate federal policy changes, with systematic erosion of parity prices and other deregulatory efforts. Get big or get out has been our governments mantra. Farmers with the means to consolidate have been rewarded for growing monoculture commodities. Tribal nations and traditional producers as well as small farmers who have always practiced or shifted to diversified agroecological farming have effectively been subsidizing the US agriculture sector. It is rare for these food producers to make a living without supplemental income. Unsurprisingly, farm suicides in rural America are 45% higher than the rest of the population.

The WTO has worsened an already unequal playing field between the Global South and Global North, the unions note. What every nation-state can do, at the very least, is protect small farmers from deregulatory efforts, such as the three farm laws in India, that diminish the limited bargaining power that farmers have, pushing them off their farms, they said.

Finally, the unions urged governments in the US and India to support independent farmers and localised food systems.

We have great respect for the unified struggles the farmers and farmworkers of Samyukt Kisan Morcha have built, and we stand with them, the unions announced.

Below is the list of signatories:

1. A Growing Culture2. Abanitu Organics3. AFGE Local 33544. Agri-Cultura Cooperative Network5. Agricultural Justice Project6. Agroecology Commons7. Agroecology Research-Action Collective8. Alabama State Association of Cooperatives9. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas10. Alliance for Progressive South Asians (Twin Cities)11. American Sustainable Business Council12. Americana World Community Center13. Ancestor Energy14. Association for Farmers Rights Defense, AFRD Georgia15. Black Farmers & Ranchers New Mexico/National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association16. Buttermilk Falls CSA17. Center for Regional Agriculture Food and Transformation18. CoFED19. Community Agroecology Network20. Community Alliance for Global Justice21. Community Alliance with Family Farmers22. Community Farm Alliance23. Community Food and Justice Coalition24. Compassionate Action for Animals25. Disparity to Parity26. Earth Ethics Action27. East Michigan Environmental Action Council/Cass Commons28. Echo Valley Hope29. Ecologistas en Accin30. Ecosocialist Working Group, International Committee, Democratic Socialists of America31. Fair World Project32. Family Farm Action Alliance33. Family Farm Defenders34. Farm Aid35. Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance36. Farmers On The Move37. Farmworker Association of Florida38. Ground Operations39. Health of Mother Earth Foundation40. i4Farmers41. Imagining Transnational Solidarities Research Circle42. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy43. Institute for Earthbound Studies44. Just Transition Alliance45. Land Core46. National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association47. National Family Farmers Coalition48. Natures Wisdom49. NC Climate Justice Collective50. NeverEndingFood51. North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project52. Northeast Organic Farming Association Vermont53. Northeast Organic Farming Association, Mass. Chapter54. Northeast Organic Farming Association-Interstate Council55. OPEIU 3956. Peoples Architecture Commonwealth57. Pesticide Action Network North America58. Philadelphia Community farm59. Real Food Media60. Regenerative Organic Alliance61. Regenerative Rising62. Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA63. Rural Advancement Fund of the National Sharecropper Fund64. Rural Coalition65. Rural Development Leadership Network66. Rural Vermont67. Safe Food and Feed Foundation68. Santa Cruz Permaculture69. Science for the People70. Science for the People Twin Cities71. Seeds for All72. Shaping Change Collaborative73. Sierra Club-USA74. Southeastern African-American Farmers Organic Network75. Steward Foundation76. Texas Drought Project77. The Carbon Underground78. United People Community Organization, Market, and Farms79. University of MN Food Recovery Network80. Uprooted & Rising81. US Food Sovereignty Alliance82. Utopia Cornucopia83. Vision for Change Foundation84. Vitis and Ovis Farm85. Washington Biotechnology Action Council86. Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice87. Womens Environmental Institute

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'Happened in US 40 Years Ago': 87 US Farmers' Unions Speak Out for Indian Farmers' Protest - The Wire