Archive for March, 2008
Reflections on Sustainable Agriculture in Latin America
Post Date: Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 Farmers helping their brothers, so that they can help themselves…to find solutions and not be dependent on the technician or on the bank. That is Campesino a Campesino.
- Argelio Gonzales, Santa Lucia, Nicaragua, 1991
For my part, and from that day on, I stopped trying to teach farmers how to farm and dedicated myself to helping them experiment and learn from each other. This was one of many “beginnings” of the grassroots movement today called Campesino a Campesino, or Farmer to Farmer. Over the last three decades, this movement has spread throughout Mexico, Central America, and recently, Cuba.
For thirty years, the Movimiento Campesino a Campesino (MCAC), now with several hundred thousand farmer-promoters, has helped farming families in the rural villages of Latin America improve their livelihoods and conserve their natural resources. The promoters of MCAC have shown that, given the chance to generate and share agroecological knowledge freely amongst themselves, smallholders are perfectly capable of developing sustainable agriculture, even under highly adverse conditions. The capacity to develop agriculture locally is not only the key to sustainable agricultural development, but, for campesinos, it is a matter of survival. This explains in a very fundamental way why the movement has spread as widely as it has. It works!
The methods practiced by Campesino a Campesino are often found in development projects run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout Latin America. But the spread of agroecological knowledge through NGO projects and paid technicians is slow and expensive. Once project money dries up or NGOs move on, village agricultural development often comes to a halt. Campesino a Campesino’s movement-driven approach to sustainable agricultural development is based on local farmer capacities for innovation and solidarity. This allows communities to continually respond to the perpetual uncertainties of climate, market, and environmental shocks—with or without the presence of technicians and NGOs.
And, Campesino a Campesino has begun to have influence at higher levels. I remember the day Campesino a Campesino changed from a loose collection of soil conservation projects scattered across Mesoamerica into a regional movement for farmer-led sustainable agricultural development. The turning point came when farmers from Mexico and Nicaragua arranged visits to share knowledge and innovations.
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