Paul Gomberg

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Paul Gomberg 7 Oct 2025 16:56 UTC
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
I find this helpful in understanding what EA is trying to do. Is there a place where funding criteria are stated? This would help me to understand more.

Paul Gomberg 5 Oct 2025 20:10 UTC
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in reply to: Guive’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
On productivity of small farms vs. larger ones see Peter Rosset’s paper at this link https://archive.foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PB4-The-Multiple-Functions-and-Benefits-of-Small-Farm-Agriculture_Rosset.pdf.

Also https://grain.org/en/article/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland.
On mutual aid: citing Kropotkin’s use of that phrase (or presumably a Russian phrase so translated) is odd. If my next door neighbor and I help one another out, does that make us followers of Kropotkin? That was a standard move of anti-communists in the ’50s and 60s: to call anyone who agreed with communists on any issue a communist dupe.
La Via Campesina is an umbrella including 180 peasant organizations with a total of 200 million members. All followers of Kropotkin?

Paul Gomberg 4 Oct 2025 21:46 UTC
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
If opposition to genocide and oppression of poor farmers makes one a “leftist,” then I guess it is. Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” highlighted the oppression experienced by poor peasants during the war of secession that established Bangladesh as a separate nation.
So there are movements of the very people Singer seemed concerned with in that essay, people suffering from hunger and marginalization. Does no one who is part of the EA movement believe that EA should express solidarity with hunger’s victims fighting on their own behalf?

There seems to be a choice between doing for passive others or acting in solidarity with hunger’s victims who are active in struggle. Is it always the former, never the latter? If so, doesn’t that smack of “the white man’s burden?”

Paul Gomberg 2 Oct 2025 22:03 UTC
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in reply to: Guive’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
Just a fact: traditional peasant farming produces more food per unit of land than capital-intensive large scale farms. So much for “small is beautiful.”
Since when is mutual aid “leftist ideology?”

Paul Gomberg 2 Oct 2025 17:06 UTC
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
MST has 1.5 million members, Brazilian farming families struggling for access to land and building various cooperative forms of mutual aid. La Via Campesina is an umbrella organization of nearly 200 groups in more than 80 countries.
To my knowledge there is no unifying ideology, even a vague one such as “anti-capitalism.” However, their ways of producing food are different from the capital-intensive corporate farming incorporating petroleum-based fertilizers ( which contribute hugely to climate change) as well as chemical herbicides and pesticides. Small-scale farming of this sort produces most of the world’s food for human consumption.

Paul Gomberg 14 May 2025 14:30 UTC
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in reply to: Paul Gomberg’s comment on: EA and the food radicals
Leaving aside the issue of growing under nutrition and malnutrition, we should look at other effects of corporate farming. Undisturbed soil has a natural fertility which is destroyed by ploughing, herbicides, and pesticides. (The first three chapters of Monbiot’s Regenisis are very good on this.) Corporate farming substitutes petroleum-derived fertilizers to compensate for the loss of natural fertility. Besides polluting waterways and creating dead zones in oceans, these fertilizers contribute more to climate change than all the fuel used in transportation.

Traditional peasant farming produces more calories per unit of land than does corporate agriculture. The latter’s advantage is that it produces more calories per worker than traditional farming, hence more profit for capitalists, incentivizing land grabs and pushing peasants onto increasingly marginal land.
Peasant farming is both labor and knowledge-intensive. The farmer must be a practical scientist studying by trial and error how to get maximum production without chemicals; she must be a student of the soil, of various crops and their effects on soil fertility and control of pests. Monbiot is particularly good in explaining how this works.

Paul Gomberg 14 May 2025 13:48 UTC
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: EA and the food radicals
The gross figures (from Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez, George Monbiot, and others) are as follows: the percentage suffering from under nutrition has declined; however, the number suffering from under nutrition and especially malnutrition has grown alongside a large growth of calories per capita. There is more money to be made selling soy and corn to beef and poultry companies than to poor people. Grain is dumped into Asian fisheries while fishing families, especially women and children suffer from malnutrition; menstruating women and girls are especially vulnerable to anemia from a diet lacking iron. To earn needed cash fishers sell the best parts and suffer from malnutrition. I can get more precise references if you like.

Paul Gomberg 13 May 2025 15:18 UTC
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in reply to: Dylan Richardson’s comment on: EA and the food radicals
I couldn’t find anything at Give Well searching the names of the most prominent food radicals.