THE THIRD WORLD BIND NOTES
words and music (c) 1986 Nancy E. Abrams

The First International Conference on Global Sustainable Agriculture was held a few years ago at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I teach. They tried to get Joan Baez for their banquet entertainment, but she was not available, so I was their second choice. When I perform for a conference, I always like to write a special song about the topic of the conference, and I offered to do so for this one although I knew nothing about sustainable agriculture. I did a lot of research for this song, but the best book I found, although I have unfortunately forgotten the name and the author, was about how to behave morally in an unfair world. In that book the author suggested an exercise in imagining how you would feel if you were a third world farmer. That idea was the key to structuring this song, although much of the content came from other books and articles, from conversations with conference organizer Steve Gliessman and writer Frances Moore Lappe (whose books I had read and who came to speak at the conference), and also from memories of a summer I spent in a tiny farming village in Yucatan when I was a college student.