Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

interview: león
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Interview: Jesús León Santos
Integral Peasant Development Center of the Mixteca (CEDICAM), Mexico
Interviewer: Liz Shapiro
Q: How did you become involved in this area that you’re working, struggling in?
A: Well, as I’ve said to many people, I’m of campesino origin, and this has permitted
me to analyze and see the problems that are facing us now. ...Campesinos are faced
with many limitations and this, I believe, has helped me to think that we have to look
for strategies to get out of this very difficult situation. We can’t grab onto the easiest
escape, that of “We’re living in a difficult place, and the easiest thing is to go
somewhere else, and that’s all there is to it.” What we have to do is [ask], “How do we
find solutions and alternatives in our own place of origin?”
We’re not living in the countryside because we don’t know how do to
anything else, or because we don’t have enough education. I think many of
us who are living in the countryside are living there because we like it,
because we feel that it is an important profession too.
Q: And what are the biggest problems confronting the campesinos with whom you
work?
A: Well, in the first place, for a long time one of the primary serious difficulties that
we’ve had is the quality of the soil. It’s highly eroded due to the long history of a
strong pressure [on the land], mainly following the arrival of the Spanish to this
region, and so drastic levels of erosion have been reached.
Another of the serious difficulties we’re facing is the scarcity of rain. We are in a
zone where rain is really extremely limited. We have the lowest rainfall in the state....
Another thing is that in the last three decades of the last century, the Green
Revolution really caused campesinos to become totally dependent, and to forget the
systems of production they had before. Making changes now is much more difficult,
because campesinos have been drawn into this system of dependence on agrochemicals,
principally fertilizers that make the soil produce more – and this complicates the
process of finding changes and making campesinos believe that the systems used
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