Inheritance of Dust
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The Mexican government is uninterested in its multitudes of rural poor. It is a government which favors American businesses with massive tax breaks while families of Mexican farmers starve, and which denies nearly 25 million poor subsistence farmers access to water other than that falling from the skies while running pipelines to the arid fields of rich agribusinesses.It is a story increasingly being repeated across the developing world, as poor nations begin to pay the environmental price for the First World’s appetite for energy.
This story is a window into the villagers of Pocoboch, on the Yucatan peninsula who represent millions of subsistence farmers across the developing world whose traditional way of life is close to collapse due to the rapid desertification of their land and exacerbated by such government policies.
Inheritance of Dust - Published in Virginia Quarterly Review Words by Lygia Navarro and photographs by Jason Florio