Educational Media Reviews Online

This video examines how certain farmers in two very different countries--the United States and Mozambique--have evolved similar methods of preserving their way of life.

In this country, African-American farmers have dwindled from almost a million strong at the beginning of this century to fewer than 18,000 today, as American agriculture has become more and more agribusiness, dominated by a few mammoth corporation farms. In Mozambique, a devastating civil war in the wake of independence from Portugal in 1975, followed by drought in the late '80s and early '90s, has meant increasing dispossession from the land on the part of large numbers of subsistence farmers.

African-American farmers in rural Georgia, the first focus of this video, as well as rural farmers in Mozambique, the second focus, have discovered that by pooling limited resources into agricultural cooperatives, they can circumvent middlemen and increase their profits to a level that can sustain them. In Georgia, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives sells its members' produce to specialty markets as well as inner-city neighborhoods in Southern cities like Atlanta at prices residents can afford. The Union of Cooperatives in Mozambique has enabled its mostly female members to diversity their activities outside of vegetable farming into chicken farming, so that the vagaries of climate cannot keep them from raising food to feed their children and themselves and can tide them over until rainfall is adequate to raise vegetable crops again.

The cooperative ideal has worked well for two widely geographically separated groups of people with remarkably similar problems. This video is highly recommended for libraries with non-book collections in agricultural economics and comparative farming systems.