Curso Vii Lectura 2. New Rural Social Movements

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34 New Rural Social Movements and Agroecology Eduardo Sevilla Guzmán and Joan Martinez-Alier

There are new movements emerging in the world in defence of agricultural policies favourable to traditional agroecological methods. The agroecological antagonism to neo-liberal globalization is described here mainly with reference to networks in Latin America (because of our own direct knowledge and participation in them), but it is a worldwide phenomenon, as shown by movements in India also described here. These movements have been born out of local resistance to seed multinationals, the degradation of ecosystems and the threats to livelihoods because of agricultural modernization. They also oppose subsidized exports of agricultural surpluses. These movements are based on ancient knowledge of farming systems and also on the innovations of low input agriculture. The main actors are not neo-rural postmodern organic farmers (as they might exist in the United States and Europe) but spokesmen for large rural populations, sometimes peasants, sometimes landless labourers (as the MST in Brazil). Such movements are interpreted in this chapter in the wider context of a world movement of dissidence formed by a network of networks. By ‘agroecology’ we refer here to a collective practice of agriculture which explicitly considers not only economic and social aspects (income, employment) but also environmental and ecological aspects (pollution, soil conservation, cycles of nutrients, energy flow). Therefore there is a link between agroecology as a practice and the science of agroecology (Altieri, 1987; Gliessman, 1998). Agroecology in our view promotes the endogenous potential of agriculture, relying on traditional peasant knowledge, though being also open to innovations that help sustainability (Sevilla Guzmán and Woodgate, 1997).

THE RISE IN LATIN AMERICA OF THE RURAL ARTICULATION OF DISSIDENCE AGAINST NEO-LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION The usual explanation for the disappearance of the active agricultural population in the process of economic development is that, as agricultural productivity increases, production cannot increase pari passu because of a low demand for agricultural produce as a whole. Therefore, the active agricultural population decreases not only in relative but also in absolute terms, and indeed this has been the path of development – in Britain even before the First World War, in Spain since the 1960s, not yet in India. Now, however, agricultural productivity is not well calculated: nothing is deducted from the value of production on account of chemical pollution and genetic erosion, and the inputs are valued too cheaply because fossil energy is too cheap, and because unsustainable use is made of soils and some fertilizers. What the ecologically correct prices should be is unknown; the important point is that the ecological critique of the economics of agriculture opens up a large space for neoNarodnik argument, a space that is being increasingly taken up around the world. Issues such as biodiversity conservation, threats from pesticides and energy saving are transformed into local arguments for improvements in the conditions of life and for cultural survival of peasants. Such arguments have become widespread in new networks such as the Via Campesina (the Peasant Way), which has instituted an international Peasant’s Day, the 17th April, the anniversary of the massacre of

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19 members of the Movement of the Landless (MST) in 1996 in El Dorado, Parà, Brazil. The convergence of those that, at the beginning of the 1980s, were called ‘revolutionary peasant unions’, took place in Managua in December 1981 during the ‘Continental Conference of Agrarian Reform and Peasant Movements’. There an interaction was initiated which would lead to the birth of the Continental Peasants Movement in Latin America. The different Latin American organizations (with a small European representation) thus became aware of the similarities in both their means of struggle and their ideological evolution. Such is the case of the Andalucian SOC – Sindicato de Obreros del Campo1 (land labourers union) – and the Brazilian MST, legalized in 1984, but at work in an embryonic state in Rio Grande do Sul since 1978 (cf. Navarro, 1996; De Medeiros, 1999; Mançano Fernández, 2000; Wizniewsky, 2001). This process of convergence between indigenous and peasant organizations became more consolidated on the South American continent through the formal organization of the Latin American Congress of Peasant Organizations (CLOC) in 1994 in Peru. We would point out here that there was an interaction between the MST (as a proto-organization) and other groups in the first half of the 1980s, which became more intense in the 1990s. These first interactions involved productive experiments of an agroecological nature (Sevilla Guzmán, 1999) and the creation of the first European committees in support of the Mexican Neo-Zapatism and the MST and then those that developed around the SOC. Probably the next step in this process of confluence of independent peasant organizations took place on 14/15 November 1984, with the Latin American Conference of Independent Peasant Organizations, organized in Mexico by the Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala. Here the Peasant Confederation of Peru, the National Federation of Peasant Organizations of Ecuador, the Independent Peasant Movement of the Dominican Republic, the National Confederation of Peasant Workers Union of France, the Union of Rural Workers and the recently founded MST of Brazil exchanged experiences. The MST started in the south of Brazil and has spread to the whole country. It has withstood violent armed repression in Paranà, Parà and other states. Its tactics consist in occupation, settlement and immediate cultivation of large properties. Some of the MST leaders also belong to the Workers’ party, though the MST is more to the left. Other spaces of confluence in the dissidence process include the international exchange events

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convoked by the MST of Brazil in 1985 and by the FENOCI of Ecuador in 1986. In Ecuador in 1987 the First Andean Exchange Workshop of Peasant Indigenous Organizations was held. In Central America, in 1987, the COCENTRA was created and, in 1989, ASOCODE. In October of that same year indigenous and peasant organizations of the Andean region and the MST of Brazil named their continental campaign ‘500 years of indigenous, black and popular resistance’ in Bogota, Colombia. Three continental conferences were held, as well as several meetings coordinated by different Latin American countries, with the assistance of European rural (or so-called peasant) organizations.

THE ZAPATISTA MOVEMENT AS ONE CREATOR OF THE ANTAGONISTIC RURAL DISCOURSE The key social actor, along with the MST, in the configuration of antagonistic rural praxis and discourse was the Neo-Zapatista Movement of Chiapas. Mexican peasant agriculture was and is under increasing threat because of food imports from the United States, which increased under the NAFTA free trade treaty between the US, Canada and Mexico. Eco-Zapatism was overdue in Mexico. In the early 1990s, Guillermo Bonfil had published his deeply moving account of vanishing indigenous Mexico (Bonfil Batalla, 1998). It has now become general knowledge in Mexico that indigenous cultures and biodiversity go together (Toledo, 1996, 2000). Biodiversity is valuable even when it has no market. The Chiapas rebellion came into the open against the NAFTA on the day it became operative (1 January 1994), helping to make indigenous peasantry a political subject. Neo-Zapatism came to signify, in 1994, a reaction against the attacks on Mexican peasant agriculture and a real incentive towards the convergence and coordination of the movements that question economic globalization and neoliberalism at world level, as well as the progressive consolidation of a new antagonistic discourse. In fact, the Zapatista movement made possible the introduction of socio-cultural diversity into the worldwide anti-neo-liberal movement’s discourse (when this was in its gestation period); that is to say, the enormous diversity of subjects, territories, resources, traditions and realities that the world was made up of at the end of the twentieth century.

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In an attempt to come up with a synthesis, the characteristics of Neo-Zapatism, an age-old and at the same time new social movement, are the following: 1 The acceptance of a historical continuance between its processes of collective social action and those developed by those ethnic groups which through multiple processes throughout 500 years have put up resistance to colonization and oppression generated by the expansion of the European socio-cultural identity. 2 The attribution to economic globalization and neo-liberalism in present times, of the historical oppression suffered by the indigenous communities. Specifically the foreseeable impact of the NAFTA on the indigenous communities of Chiapas, which added to their resistance to the eviction of their communities and to the subordination to the interests of the timber companies and landowners. 3 This struggle against exclusion does not end with their confrontation with the modernizing socio-economic system. They are also fighting for the recognition of the Native Indians in the Mexican constitution. The diversity of the ethnic groups which make up their movement has led them to defend the recognition of differences: ‘We want a world where all worlds fit in’. 4 They demand a democracy unadulterated by external or internal mismanagement, corruption and distortion of the true participation of people. To this effect, they are Mexican patriots who oppose the ‘foreign domination of North American imperialism’. Moreover, they aim to make a true democratic change to the political organization so that ‘those that are in charge also have to obey’. From the depths of the Lacandona forest, the EZLN and Subcomandante Marcos developed an ‘informational strategy’ to fulfil the establishment of an ‘autonomous communication’ to reach public opinion and to generate a process of confluence with all the groups that are excluded from the modernizing socio-economic system. With this, they not only developed a way of defending themselves with the spoken word (‘We only take up arms to make a statement’), but they have also aimed to generate networks of dissidence to the socio-economic and cultural oppression which they suffer. This was how the Zapatista movement, through its ‘autonomous communication’ made contact with the, then incipient, economic

anti-globalization social movements, holding debates which took place in the context of the campaign of ‘50 years are enough’, against the half-century of existence of global financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank). Demonstrations took place in different places throughout the world, culminating in the alternative forum ‘The Other Voices of the Planet’ which developed in Madrid in the autumn of 1994. Continuing with its dynamics of resistance and informational struggle, the EZLN called, in Spain in the summer of 1997, the Second Intergalactic Conference against Neoliberalism and for Humanity, by means of an itinerant celebration throughout various towns and cities that had as its driving force local Zapatista committees. In Andalucia the militant members of the SOC played a central role in the organizational infrastructure of the congress, especially in the closing acts which took place in El Indiano, a large farm which was acquired after many years of struggle involving occupations and imprisonments. This was one of the agroecological experiences that the cooperatives of the SOC carried out as a ‘place for reflection and sociopolitical and productive practice’ (Sevilla Guzmán, 1999; Guzmán Casado et al., 2000).

THE IMPACT OF THE FTAA The biggest and most devastating impact that, in the short term, the economic globalization process is having on peasant and family-run agriculture is caused by the policies of the freeing of international agricultural trade (Rosset, 1999) coupled with the subsidies to exports in the United States (and the EU). In this sense, the NAFTA must be contemplated within a global strategy that intends to configurate a ‘Free Trade Area in America’ (FTAA). It intended to deregulate the market, services and investments throughout both American continents in such a way that the multinationals had the right to use natural resources indiscriminately. Dorval Brunelle (2001) illustrated the repercussions of this deregulation with a Mexican example: ‘The Mexican government had to pay 16.7 million dollars to the Californian firm Metalclad Corp., because a Mexican municipality would not authorize the installation of a hazardous waste dump against which the local population had been mobilized.’ The approval of the FTAA meant the gradual elimination of any type of tariff. Therefore, products coming from the United States and Canada had free access and were exempt from custom and non-custom restrictions.

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Likewise the FTAA would mean unrestricted access to bidding and contracts for public sector supply. Local companies were left in the hands of the multinational market to carry out activities linked to water and energy provision in the urban economies of Latin American countries. The third requirement of this amplification of trade centred on the patents over life and intellectual property, leaving in the hands of the multinational corporations the provision of seeds, as well as the technological packets linked to the agriculture that industrialized farming, introduced throughout the Latin American area, requires. Thus an antagonism towards the FTAA emerged and it is still mounting. It appeared in the form of antagonism towards the FTAA from the American trade union movement and the social movements crystallizing in the appearance of a Continental Social Alliance (CSA). In fact, this process began in the ministerial meeting in Denver in 1995. The trade union movement of the 35 countries of the Americas, including Cuba, with the support of the Pan-American Regional Employment Organization (PREO) – the continental wing of the International Confederation of Free Unions – organized a parallel conference to express their mistrust of the FTAA. The following year, the American Union Movement assembled in the Colombian city of Cartagena to elaborate a document reflecting on this subject and to put pressure on government representatives. The process continued that same year in Brazil. During the meeting of the presidents of the member countries of Mercosur, where ‘both the first central trade union of the USA, the AFL–CIO and the ORIT sent representatives to offer support to their South American counterparts who had reached an agreement to celebrate an international day of struggle for the workers of Mercosur’. However, it was in Belo Horizonte in 1987 that the first convergence between the American trade union movement and the civic organizations against free trade occurred. These have since worked together on an alternative project to the FTAA, The decision was taken to create a Continental Social Alliance (CSA) which would face up to the FTAA, elaborating, in a participative way, concrete and viable alternatives. In 1998, the five existing national coalitions against free trade2 called for the first Summit of the American People. This took place in Santiago de Chile from the 14th to the 17th of April, parallel to the ‘second summit’ of the leaders of the ‘American States’. Environmental and feminist associations as well as several associations of alternative American social movements responded to that call. There a programmatic document was produced of great relevance to the configuration

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of alternatives to global neo-liberalism, ‘Alternatives for America: towards an agreement between the people of the continent’. In this document it was established that: Trade and investments should not be an end in themselves but a means capable of guiding us towards a fair and long-lasting development. It is fundamental that citizens exercise their rights in the formulation and evaluation of the social and economic policies of the continent. The central objectives of such policies should be the promotion of economic sovereignty, the collective well-being and the reduction of inequalities on all levels.

The fact that the Latin American Congress of Peasant Organizations (CLOC) was involved with this dynamic, representing of the Peasant Movement of Latin America and the Caribbean, is relevant to our line of argument. Antagonism towards globalization in the American continent should be analysed in the much wider context of global dissidence. Here the Movement against Maastricht and Economic Globalization (MAM) and the confluence against the Multi-lateral Investment Agreement (MIA) developed parallel and confluent dynamics. In effect, from 1990 to 1995 multiple European social movements joined forces by incorporating in to their ideas and debates calls for a struggle against the rapidly developing ‘Europe of Capital’. Hence, feminist, ecological, pacifist and Third World groups and all the collectives committed to the fight against poverty, with ethical and solidarity ideals, joined together, consolidating the MAM. On the other hand, the confluence against the MIA acquired special relevance in Canada, France, the United States, central Scandinavian countries and several countries from the periphery such as Malaysia, the Philippines, India and Brazil. Friends of the Earth and Le Monde Diplomatique conducted vigorous campaigns against the MIA. The joining together of these two fronts of economic anti-globalization began to interfere with the plans of global neoliberalism. This forced a delay in the signing of the MIA, at the heart of the OECD, in Paris in October 1998, through the configuration of Global Action of the People.

THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE ANTAGONIST NETWORK AGAINST NEO-LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION: GLOBAL ACTION OF THE PEOPLE Since the First Intergalactic Conference against Neo-liberalism and for Humanity, which took

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place in the Lacandona forest in the summer of 1996, and the Second Intergalactic Conference, which took place in Spain, the processes of confluence have quickened, leading to the creation of Global Action of the People (AGP) against free trade. This group was the first coordinator, on a world level, against economic globalization and neo-liberalism. In Geneva, at the beginning of 1998, the very first meeting of the AGP was attended by some three hundred activists from all over the world. There were representatives from the Southern periphery, of the indigenous people that inhabit the most recondite places on the planet, that suffer a threat to their habitats and territories as a result of the unstoppable expansion of globalization (the Maoris of New Zealand, the CONAIE of Ecuador, the Mayan indians, the Ogonis of Nigeria …); also the peasant movements of those places on the planet where there still exist important contingents of population living in the traditional rural world (Nepal, India …), as well as new peasant movements that are fighting for access to community ownership of land (MST of Brazil). There were also representatives of those metropolitan movements fighting against the consequences of the so-called plans structural adjustment of the [International Monetary Fund] and the [World Bank] that urban populations are suffering (eg. the teachers’ movement in Buenos Aires, or the movements from the slums of Mexico City). Also represented were the new workers’ organizations (many of them clandestine due to repression) of the maquila industries in Central American countries, and even organizations representing people with specific problems as such is the case with certain Afro-American communities in Caribbean countries. (Fernandez Durán and Sevilla Guzmán, 1999: 365)

The dissident groups from countries of the centre of the system were also diversely represented: In Geneva the French unemployed movement, as well as certain organizations on the European network against unemployment, precariousness and social exclusion, attended. North American organizations that work with the homeless, also Food Not Bombs. New organizations in defence of part-time workers or those threatened by privatization processes. The squatter movement and the self-managed social centres from different European countries. In fact the meeting in Geneva was organised thanks to the active participation of the squatter movement of the city. Some direct action organizations from the ecological environment, amongst which the movement Reclaim the Street from Great Britain stood out. As well as the different groups and networks that attempt to unveil the consequences that the Maastricht treaty had on the population of the European Union countries. (1999: 366)

Why is it that such diverse social groups join forces to fight against free trade? This question

can only be answered in the context of the debates that the different groups have carried out in order to identify the nature of globalization, subject to the command of the profit logic of multinational companies. The transnational joining of states, in the form of their international institutions – fundamentally the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, is coactively imposing economic policies that openly impact negatively on both human work and natural resources. The large multinational corporations have been studied since the early 1990s by different social collectives and networks that have witnessed how pacifist, feminist and ecological claims have been seemingly incorporated into sales campaigns as slogans. At the same time these very same transnationals use the workforce from the periphery through the relationships they maintain with their production lines and affiliated suppliers. They exploit precariousness and child labour, impose a total absence of social benefits and a union prohibition, amongst other human rights transgressions, as well as paying wages so low that workers are unable to feed their families. In a similar way, the dissidence against economic globalization came to the conclusion that neo-liberal politics mean a growing degradation of natural resources, revealing the commercial, financial and speculative mechanisms which pull down thousands of hectares of forest, transforming this land for the growth of crop or tree plantations, forcing indigenous groups, whose livelihood depended on the forest, to move. The uprooting of mangroves around the Tropics to the benefit of shrimp exports became an international scandal. Also, attention started to be drawn to the human and environmental damage caused by the obligation to pay external debts (emphasized by the Jubilee 2000 campaigns).

THE EMERGENCE OF AGROECOLOGY FROM THE ANTAGONISM PROCESSES TOWARDS NEO-LIBERALISM AND GLOBALIZATION In the past few decades there have been various productive experiences that show the emergence of a new management model of natural resources, based on local knowledge and its merging with modern technologies. Many of these recreate, in some aspects, historical forms of socio-economic organization linked to socio-cultural identity.

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Conventional agricultural science would not hesitate in labelling such experiences as a new paradigm of anti-modern rural development. Such experiences are dispersed world-wide (Pretty, 1995). They are born from processes of resistance in the interstices of agricultural modernization and they offer a list of productive and social strategies. There are two social spaces where such ‘productive dissidence’ towards agricultural modernization can be found, according to Victor Manuel Toledo. They are ‘focal points of civilizatory resistance’. The first, which he refers to as ‘postmodern’, is made up of ‘a polychrome range of social and countercultural movements’. The second social space is located on certain ‘islands of pre-modernity or pre-industriality’, those enclaves of the planet where western civilization did not or still has not managed to impose its values, practices, corporations and modern actions. They are predominantly, although not exclusively, rural, in countries such as India, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Peru or Mexico, where the presence of various indigenous populations (made up of peasants, fishermen, shepherds and craftsmen) confirm the presence of civilizatory models different to those originated in Europe. These do not constitute immaculate archaisms, but contemporary syntheses or forms of resistance born from the encounters that have taken place in the last few centuries between the expansive force of western civilization and the ever present forces of the ‘peoples without history’. (Toledo, 2000: 53)

THE EXPERIENCE OF INDIA Elements in the movement for agroecology in the south are the collective defence of agrobiodiversity, food security and the in situ conservation or co-evolution of plant genetic resources. Thus in Mexico, beyond the neo-Zapatism born in Chiapas, a wider movement has risen since 2002 called ‘En Defensa del Maíz’, against maize imports from the United States. In India, as Kothari puts it (1998: 51), a single species of rice (Oryza sativa) collected from the wild some time in the distant past, has diversified into approximately 50,000 varieties as a result of a combination of evolutionary/habitat influences and the innovative skills of farmers. This contribution to genetic diversity is a fact that the modern seed industry conveniently sidesteps, and that the consumers of industrialized countries have ignored until recently. Mexican peasants never thought of patenting or instituting other types of intellectual property rights on the varieties of maize that have been used by the commercial seed industry.

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Agricultural biopiracy is a topic which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been discussing for some twenty years under the name of Farmers’ Rights. Even some governments say that if a company takes a seed from a farmer’s field, adds a gene and patents the resulting seed for sale at a profit [or otherwise ‘improves’ the seed by traditional methods of crossing, and then protects it under the UPOV rules], there is no reason the initial seed should be free. They also say patents ignore the contributions by indigenous peoples, who often are the true discoverers of useful plants and animals, or of farmers who improve plants over the generations. The negotiation run by the Food and Agriculture Organization [on Farmers’ Rights] is weighing whether to compensate traditional farmers for work on improving crops and maintaining different varieties. (Pollack, 1999)

But, then, who wants the Third World farmers to continue growing and locally freely sharing or selling their own low-yielding, low-input seeds? From the point of view of international capitalism, replacing their seeds by commercial seeds would be more conducive to economic growth. Should not traditional seeds be forbidden on grounds of lack of sanitary or yield guarantees? There is then a growing alarm in southern countries which are centres of agricultural biodiversity, or close neighbours to them, because of the disappearance of traditional farming. This new awareness, which goes totally against the grain of development economics, is helped by the social and cultural distance between the seed companies (often multinationals) and the local peasants and farmers. While conservation of ‘wild’ biodiversity in ‘national parks’ is seen often as a ‘northern’ idea imposed on the south (as to some extent is really the case), the conservation of in situ agricultural biodiversity was for many years left aside by the large wilderness northern organizations. It was pushed instead by specific NGOs such as RAFI and GRAIN, also by southern scientists and by southern groups who developed pro-peasant ideologies. There are deliberate attempts in India by groups and individual farmers to revive agricultural diversity. In the Hemval Ghati of the Garhwal Himalaya, some farmers under the banner of the Beej Bachao Andolan (Save the Seed Movement) have been travelling in the region collecting seeds of a large diversity of crops. Many farmers grow high-input high-yield varieties for the market but also other varieties for their own families. An important issue is to promote not only the survival of many varieties of the main crops (wheat and rice) but also to keep alive other

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food crops that have been not subject to ‘Green Revolution’ seed substitution – like bajra, ramdana and jowar, and also pulses in general. In the south of the country, the somewhat grandly named ‘seed satyagraha’ of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), became well known in the early 1990s.3 Monsanto has used the loopholes in legislation or in effective regulation to introduce transgenic crops outside the United States. Thus, there is a debate in some parts of India against the introduction of Bt cotton (that is, cotton seeds into which the bacillus thurigiensis has been genetically engineered to act as an insecticide). In Andhra Pradesh, the farmers’ movement APRS uprooted and burned two crop sites in 1998, and alerted the state parliament and government to ban further field sites, while in Karnataka the leader of the farmers’ movement KRRS transparently called on the company to reveal the exact locations of its field tests of transgenic Bt cotton. Monsanto has been more successful elsewhere. There was little opposition in Argentina to transgenic soybeans (Pengue, 2000). In India, on 30 November 1999, the first day of the WTO conference in Seattle, several thousand farmers gathered in Bangalore at the Mahatma Gandhi statue in the park. They issued a ‘Quit India’ notice to Monsanto, and they warned the prestigious Indian Institute of Science not to collaborate with Monsanto in research. The company was urged to leave the country or face non-violent direct action against its activities and installations. Agribusiness had already been warned with the destruction of Cargill facilities in one district back in 1993. The KRRS leaders have travelled around the world, being much involved in the anti-neo-liberal dissidence against the WTO because the new regulations on international trade bring in their wake the enforcement of property rights on commercial seeds, which unjustly do not recognize the original raw material and knowledge, while preventing farmers’ local gifts or sale of such commercial seeds. In 2001 the KRRS was still trying to prevent the wholesale introduction of transgenic Bt cotton in India. Also in India, Navdanya is a large network of farmers, environmentalists, scientists and concerned individuals which is working in different parts of the country to collect and store crop varieties, evaluate and select those with good performance, and encourage their reuse in the fields (Kothari, 1998: 60–61), certainly a more participatory strategy than that of ex situ cold storage. What other name but ‘ecological neo-Narodnism’ can be given to such initiatives? Reality is contradictory, and movements against Cargill

and Monsanto are combined in India with movements for subsidized industrial fertilizers. However, who would have thought twenty years ago that praise for organic agriculture would be expressed not by professional ethnoecologists or agroecologists or by northern neo-rural environmentalists but by real farmers from India in international trade meetings? This is not homespun oriental wisdom combating northern agricultural technology, it is not identity politics only. On the contrary, it must be interpreted as part of an international worldwide trend with solid foundations in agroecology. Should there be a rush in southern countries to impose intellectual property rights on crop varieties, animal races and medicinal knowledge? In India, Anil Gupta has long confronted this question with a pioneering large-scale ground-level effort to document the local communities’ knowledge regarding old and innovative resource uses in the form of local registers. The objectives are manifold: the exchange of ideas between communities, the revitalization of local knowledge systems and the building up of local pride in such systems, and the protection against intellectual ‘piracy’ by outsiders (Kothari, 1998: 105). The protection arises because prior registration and publication would stop patenting. As Anil Gupta (1996) has said repeatedly, if somebody is to patent some properties of neem, why not ourselves, Indian farmers and scientists? The main thrust of his work, however, has been to enhance local pride in the existing processes of conservation and innovation, and to stop outside advantage being taken gratis from this work.

TOWARDS A LATIN AMERICAN AGROECOLOGICAL MOVEMENT There is no space here (and we lack sufficient knowledge) for a review of other similar movements in countries in Asia and Africa. We shall now very briefly review some Latin American agroecological movements. In South America productive dissidence to agricultural modernization can be found in the south of Brazil, in the states of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul and extending through Misiones up to the historical region of Gran Chaco, from the north of Argentina and Paraguay as far up as the south of Bolivia. In Argentina, probably the most relevant agroecological experience that has so far emerged takes place in the province of Misiones.4 Here, a peasant agroecological movement has brought together a range of productive experiences based

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on the ‘improvement of the traditional, productive diversification, specialization in some sectors and the strengthening of production for family consumption’. Such experiences emphasize the transformation of production and the search for new markets in ferias francas de Misiones (fairs). With reference to the creation of one of these fairs, one of the organizers said, ‘We didn’t invent Ferias Francas, we are recreating an ageold experience …’. In this province, 27 fairs take place every week of the year, in which more than 2,000 farmers take part in order to sell their produce directly to customers (Carballo, 2000). Probably the most beneficial work, agroecologically speaking, that is carried out in Misiones is that of the Organic Farming Network of Misiones. Experiences with agroecological initiatives can also be found in north Santafesino,5 and in all of Gran Chaco. In the past few years a network of farmers and NGOs has taken shape, exchanging experiences (some with more than 20 years of experience, as is the case of INCUPO) and coordinating actions generating training courses for technicians and producers in agroecology. In the north of the province of Santa Fe an ‘agroecological week of the Santa Fe province’ has been developed. Since 1998, in the city of Rosario, there have existed ‘urban communitarian ecological food gardens’ on villas miseria, which provide ‘local health centres’ with medicinal plants rescued from Toba knowledge (Martinez Sarasola, 1992: 441–476). If the agroecological movement is significant in the north of Argentina it is more so in Brazil, especially in the states of Paraná (with the fundamental action of AS-PTA), Santa Catarina (with the official support of EPAGRI) and, above all, in Rio Grande do Sul where EMATER (the state organism for agricultural extension) adopted agroecology as its official policy (until 2002), declaring that the state is ‘free of transgenics’. There is in Brazil today the strongest movement in the world for land reform, the MST (the Movement of the Landless), whose social origins are in Rio Grande do Sul. In 1999 the MST declared itself against transgenic crops, and in January 2001 the MST, together with Rafael Alegria and other leaders of Via Campesina, and with José Bové of the French Confederation Paysanne, became the media stars of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum when they symbolically destroyed some Monsanto experimental fields in the village of Nao-metoques. The context was the prohibition of transgenic soybeans in Rio Grande do Sul by the state government. Even if the valiant attitude of the government and

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judiciary in Rio Grande do Sul against transgenic crops would finally fail because of federal overruling, it has served to propel the MST in an ecological direction. The transgenic issue has sparked off a general discussion on agricultural technology inside the MST. The rural–urban link of the Brazilian experiences of Rio Grande do Sul is especially relevant in Porto Alegre, where a few days a week entire streets fill up with market stalls, where many cooperatives establish ‘agroecological socialization links’ with consumers (Caporal, 1998; Costabeber, 1998; Caporal and Costabeber, 2001). However, the Brazilian agroecological phenomenon is much more widespread, as hundreds of productive agroecological experiences can be found throughout the country (Canuto, 1997). Similarly, in the states of Jalisco (Morales Hernández, 1999) and Michoacan (Toledo, 1991) in Mexico, there exist several experiences that through social collective action organize their production and marketing to face up to conventional markets. Likewise, in Chile, the excellent work of CET (previously in Santiago, now in Temuco), with its ramifications throughout the country and even throughout the rest of Latin America through CLADES (with its magazine ‘Agroecology and Development’), provide good examples of agroecological experiences, and which acquire special significance in the Mapuche territory. Also, in Colombia, a Red de Custodios de Semillas (seed wardens) exists which is composed of farmers who exchange experiences, reinforcing a recuperation of local peasant knowledge. Quite a few such alternative management proposals also have a strong indigenous content. In the land reforms of the past 50 years, the highland peasantries of the central Andes fought against the modernization of the haciendas, which sought to get rid of them; they stayed put, and increased their holdings. There are more established communities and more community (pasture) land in the Andes now than 30 or 40 years ago. This bothers the neo-liberals. The peasantry has not yet decreased in numbers, despite migration, but now the birth rate is coming down. Will Quechua and Aymara communities survive as such? Only 40 years ago, integration and acculturation was the destiny traced for them by local modernizers (such as Galo Plaza in Ecuador) and by the US political-anthropological establishment. Their resistance today would be helped by improvement in the terms of trade for their production, if subsidized imports of agricultural products from the United States and Europe were stopped, if they could get subsidies (in

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the form of payments for Farmer’s Rights, for instance, and subsidies for the use of solar energy), and if they could exercise organized political pressure for this purpose. We see explicitly for the first time in the Andes and also in Mesoamerica an agroecological pride which provides a foundation for an alternative development or, as Arturo Escobar would put it, for an alternative to development. If not this, what then? Should Andean peasants, with low-yielding agriculture, give up farming and livestock raising as the economy grows, give up their communities and their languages? Should then some of their grandchildren, as the economy grows still more, come back in small numbers as subsidized mountain caretakers, making music and dancing as Indians for the tourists? In the final analysis, in situ agricultural biodiversity and local food security could be assured as part of a movement which would put a much higher value also on the preservation of cultural diversity. This is what PRATEC in Peru, founded by the dissident agronomist Eduardo Grillo, tried to do, building upon the work by agronomists from remote provinces, such as Oscar Blanco who long defended cultivated species such as quinua and many tubers (the ‘lost crops of the Incas’) against the onslaught of imported subsidized wheat. PRATEC is romantic and extremist, but the subject it puts on the table is realistic and down-toearth. It is not their fault that it is not considered worth the attention of multilateral banks or even of universities (Apffel-Marglin and PRATEC, 1998). In the University of San Simón de Cochabamba in Bolivia there is an Agricultural Institute (AGRUCO) which is reviving Andean peasantry agroecology (Delgado, 2002; Tapia Ponce, 1999; likewise Stephan Rist, 2001 in the University of Berne: all of these published in AGRUCO, 2002). Farmers and peasants from the movements and experiences discussed in this chapter, from in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Chile and Colombia, met in December 1998 in Pereira, Colombia, and established a declaration of principles, as members of the Agroecological Movement of Latin America and the Caribbean (MAELA). In this declaration they expressed their ‘opposition to the neo-liberal model … for its degradation of nature and society’. At the same time they established, as a right of their local organizations, the ‘management and control of natural resources … without dependence on external input (agrochemical and transgenic), for the biological reproduction of their cultures’, underlining its ‘support of the promotion, exchange and diffusion of local experiences of

civil resistance and the creation of alternatives in the use and conservation of local varieties’ (MAELA, 2000). They also expressed their ‘solidarity with the MST of Brazil, the peasant movements of Bolivia, the Mapuches of Chile, the indigenous peasants of Chiapas’, amongst other groups, as an example of international peasantry.

A BRIEF CONCLUSION In this chapter we have reviewed several movements in countries of the south based on an explicit agroecological awareness. These movements are very different from the small neo-rural postmodern organic farming movements of the United States and Europe. We are still far from being able to provide a complete taxonomy of such movements in the south, and in fact nobody seems yet able to provide a whole picture. So, this chapter gives some detailed information on some cases but only a very brief (superficial, and second-hand) view of other cases. However, there are some undoubted developments a new network such as Via Campesina has arisen; many agronomists now write theses and books on agroecology based on peasant knowledge; the debates on Farmers’ Rights, biopiracy, in situ coevolution of agricultural biodiversity reach public opinion. The agricultural policies of the United States and the European Union (protectionism against some imports, large export subsidies for many other products undermining world peasant agriculture) are under attack. There is a confluence of views from peasants groups in the south and from some circles in the European Union against such policies. In Europe this is characterized as the Agrarwende, against subsidized exports but in favour of subsidies to farmers based on the multifunctionality of agriculture. In the south, subsidies to agroecological peasants would be even more justified on grounds of in situ biodiversity conservation and coevolution, energy efficiency, food security, cultural conservation. Such a policy of subsidies would require an international agreement, perhaps based on a notion of paying back an ecological debt from north to south for so many cases of biopiracy. Under the discussion on agroecology lurks a large question that is still outside the political and economic agenda. Has the march of agriculture in the past 150 years in Western countries been wrong? What is the agronomic advice that should be given not only in Peru or Mexico, but even more in India, in China? Should they preserve

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their peasantries or should they get rid of them in the process of modernization, development and urbanization? Compared to 100 years ago, and because of population growth, the number of peasants in the world has increased considerably; therefore such questions are indeed relevant. In summary, agricultural policy should balance environmental, economic, social, cultural values at different geographical and time scales. In some interpretations, modern agriculture is characterized by lower energy efficiency, genetic and soil erosion, ground and water pollution. From another point of view, in the language of economics, modern agriculture achieves increased productivity. Another, nonequivalent, description of agricultural development will emphasize loss of indigenous cultures and knowledge. There is here a clash of scientific perspectives, also a clash of values. How to integrate the different points of view? How to decide on an agricultural policy in the presence of such opposite, legitimate points of view? The role of the rural social scientist that we have adopted is to study experiences of peasant agroecological movements and extract theoretical principles for two purposes: first, to help design participatory strategies of local development, second, to intervene in the policy discussions at higher levels on the role of agriculture in today’s world. The worldwide peasant agroecological movement is now an actor in these debates, as seen very clearly in the World Social Forums of Porto Alegre both in 2001 and 2002. The wider scene is the worldwide movement against neo-liberal globalization in all its aspects (financial, trade, environment, politics), a network of networks, in which agrarian movements are just one actor. Perhaps an unexpected one.

NOTES 1

This land labourers union (SOC) was, in fact, the expression in the 1980s of the final stage of a peasant movement led by the land labourers or peasants without land who demonstrated a huge potential and capacity for struggle in Southern Spain for more than 100 years. In the 1980s there was discontent with almost total mechanization of work: coinciding with a grave industrial crisis, this meant that land labourers had little or no opportunities of alternative work. With their wish to look for new alternatives which would surpass the traditional claim to land, the SOC moved towards new social movements in general, and towards the ecological movement in particular. From the interaction of their activism with their productive experience, there emerged a clear approach of ecological management of natural resources, similar to organic farming but

2

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4

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disagreeing with some of its styles of farming. The aspect which they most dislike is the emphasis on healthy eating and the commercial interest which organic farming shows, in contrast to the social aspects. In its fight for land the SOC had had access to land on several farms. Some of these lands were obtained through continuous occupations and evictions which led to frequent imprisonments, and others through renting or purchase. There was always union pressure and support from the more progressive sectors of the church and the university, as well as some socioeconomic and cultural institutions. This meant that, in the first half of the 1980s, the SOC was accompanied by different non-peasant groups in their many actions. These ranged from peaceful demonstrations and marches looking for support from the villages and cities on their itineraries to ‘symbolic’ occupations of land or other more problematic temporary take-overs of local government buildings, airports or even the Andalusian Parliament building. The ISEC of the University of Cordoba has collaborated with SOC since it was founded in 1978. The Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART) of the United States; Common Frontiers of Canada; the Red Mexicana de Acción contra el Libre Cambio (RMALC); the Quebec network for Continental Integration; the Red Chilena por la Iniciativa de los Pueblos (RCHIP, which is presently called the Alianza Chilena por la Iniciativa de los Pueblos, ALCIR). Cf. the letter from M.D. Nanjundaswamy, ‘Farmers and Dunkel Draft’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 June 1993, and the emailed newsletter of the KRRS. Also, Akhil Gupta (1998), esp. last chapters, for a description of the KRRS up to the mid-1990s. Our knowledge of this experience is due to our unforgettable friend ‘el coya Cametti’, with whom we shared an enriching experience in the Maestria del ISEC in la Rábida. In spite of the grave social situation, disturbances, environmental degradation and the progressive depopulation of North Santafesino, there exists a wide nucleus of institutions and independent technicians which, for some years now, have made great efforts in the search for an alternative development. Many producers of the region share these ideals and some years ago started to make changes using agroecological practices. There now exists an inter-institutional articulation whose first success was the excellent diagnosis of the Chaco Argentino (1999) which was carried out by the Chaco Argentina Agroforestal Network financed by the Secretary of Natural Resources of the Argentinian central government. Incupo and Fundapaz participated in this diagnosis, thus potentiating the constitution of a Santafesina Agroforestal Board. This group developed many experiences in North Santafesino, including: (a) rotative pasture trials on forested low-lands in Vera, where FundaPaz, INTA, MAGIC Vera participated from 1994 to 1997; (b) forestry and pasture management experiences with

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NEW RURAL RELATIONS small producers of the Cuña Boscosa Santafesina developed by FundaPaz from 1992 to 2000; (c) development of means of protection against overpasturing of cattle, with the participation of CATIE of Costa Rica; (d) experiences with forestal plantations by means of intercalating the cultivation of local tree species by FundaPaz in 1995 and 1996; (e) recuperation of soil and impoverished natural pastures with producers of the La Cabral area, on the part of PSA, INTA San Cristóbal, with similar experiences in San Manuel – La Sarita, on the part of PSA; (f) selective thinning out of woodland with the production of ecological charcoal and the management of natural pastureland with rotative pasture in San Cristóbal on the part of INTA San Cristóbal; (g) forestry management experiences with small producers in the Colonia Piloto Villa Guillermina area, on the part of the PSA from 1997 to 2000; (h) agroforestry management experiences in the north-east Santafesino on the part of Pastoral Social de Rafaela, Incupo and FundaPaz from 1995 to 2000; (i) cataloguing of the native woodland flora of the province of Santa Fe, carried out by G.D. Marino and J.F. Pensiero, for the Subsecretary of Culture – the provincial government of Santa Fe; (j) introduction of subtropical pastures in the rainforests of the Chaco, on the part of a team which was coordinated by G.D. Marino of the university Department of Agricultural Sciences; (k) gathering of floral information of young quebrachales of the Cuña Boscosa Santafesina, FACA and FundaPaz; (l) cataloguing of flora and bird life in the province of Santa Fe, by members of the aforementioned university department; (m) experience of InCuPo moving from the monocrop cultivation of sugarcane to the productive recuperation of the Tacuarendí area from 1995 to 2000; (n) sustainable management of the ‘coast and islands’ ecosystem through diversified agroforestal production in the Romang area developed by the InCuPo from 1993 to 2000; (o) trials in the harvesting and storing of water for human consumption, of which the Pastoral Social de Rafaella was in charge from 1996 to 2000. The information gathered from these experiences led to the institutional articulation of the Agroforestal Board Santafesina, which is committed to working for and combining efforts in the preservation of the natural environments of the region, contributing with ideas and activities for productive and demographic recuperation of an agroecological nature.

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