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

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agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty
Jesús León, at work on CEDICAM lands.
Photographer: Phil Dahl-Bredine.
before are efficient....[Among] campesinos,
even though many of them are seeing that the
purchase of agrochemicals and such isn’t
repaid when they sell their products in the
markets, there is still great resistance to this.
Another of the limitations is the scarcity of
many natural resources in order to be able to
make rapid changes. In many tropical places,
for example, they obtain changes and results
and success and all this in two years. In the
Mixteca, there really is a need for much more
time in order to obtain changes – because it
isn’t easy to achieve immediate changes.
Q: You talked in your presentation about the
fact that there is an idea in Mexico that
campesinos don’t know anything, but what you are promoting is that to be
campesino is an ongoing profession, right? It looks as if your organization is trying
to do more than to be campesinos – saying that you do work at this, and do it well,
but that you also have to make connections outside. Do you think it is sufficient to
just be a campesino these days? What more do you have to do?
A: At the moment, in Mexico, with all of these structural adjustments that the
government is making – enforced, of course, by the international financial
organizations – there is a program they are calling “Opportunities” (Oportunidades).
In this program, they are awarding scholarships to children so that they can study....
What they are saying now is that they are giving scholarships to study at the middleto-high
school level, so young people have opportunities to continue studying, and
they don’t remain ignorant like their parents.
And, really, when I listen to this kind of [talk], I debate it a lot. Once I was in a
meeting and I said, “You consider these people – who produce food, who take care of
the environment, who are familiar with the effects of the seasons and all of this – as
ignorant? That they have different knowledge than others, that’s another subject, but
it doesn’t mean that . . . they are ignorant.”
I believe that campesinos are just as important as professors, as lawyers, as any
other profession. ...But I also believe that what we campesinos have to do in the
future is – we can’t stay isolated....
We campesinos have to find new paths that, in the first place, allow us to recognize
that we are also an important sector among all the other sectors of any nation, but
also that we play an important role within the conservation of all this diversity – that
it is not just the conservationists who are playing an important role in conserving
natural resources....We campesinos have lived for hundreds of years in zones where
there are still natural resources. This is not occurring in the areas where large-scale
agriculture has been practiced.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies