Analyze

California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Source

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley. In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. "Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan journalist and author tweeted: 'There were two anti-police brutality protests in Nairobi today. The one featuring white people made it's way to the US embassy undisturbed. The one led by working class and poor folks ended in teargas and arbitrary arrests.'

On March 25, 2020 the Kenyan government imposed a curfew to limit movement in Nairobi to prevent the spreading of COVID-19. In the ensuing months, the police 'enforced' the curfew by killing as many people as COVID-19 in Nairobi. The police have had a long and bloody history in Nairobi. Missing Voices Kenya have documented the shocking number of people who have lots their lives to police brutality over the years. Although groups in poor neighbourhoods such as Mathare have long held protests against police violence, the recent murder of George Floyd in the US has lent momentum to this movement. Thus, these groups took to the street to walk to the apartment where Yasin Moyo, a 13 year old playing on his balcony was killed by police, to demand that Black lives mattered- everywhere. The protests ended in the police tear gassing protestors.

A separate group comprising of many white protestors marched to the US Embassy to protest extrajudicial killings in the US and Kenya. From reports I have been reading about the protests on Twitter, these groups were left unharmed by the police. It is thus important that we recognize the the situatedness of protests agains police violence in different parts of the world, and the specific histories and contexts that shape each one of them, while recognizing their common themes.