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

interview: león
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For example, in the northwest [of Mexico], large areas of land that are no longer
productive, no longer useful, that were first exploited only forty or fifty years ago, are
being deserted. In forty or fifty years, these lands stopped being useful.
Q: How is it that people who are not campesinos but perhaps academics, people
who work with NGOs, or others – how is it that they can be involved in your
struggle? What is the best way for them to help you not to be isolated, or in what
other ways can they help?
A: I believe the academic sector can play an important role, as long as it makes an
effort to understand and relate to campesinos. ...It’s very difficult for academics to
forget their type of language, or ways of understanding things, because it’s not for
nothing that they’ve spent a lot of years in spaces like these [Yale], and really
sometimes it makes it very difficult for them to relate with people. . . .
I think that what we have to do is [figure out] how we can bring academics
to community development without disturbing what the communities are
already doing – because this is the problem: often academics want to
change, or to introduce things without thinking about the consequences.
They have to make an effort to pull at least one foot out of academia in
order to really feel what it is to be campesino, what it is to be a person who
has lived for many years in difficult conditions. It makes me sad, because
many of the agronomists who are coming out of the university in Mexico
are children of campesinos – but once they’ve studied agronomy, they no
longer understand campesinos despite being of campesino origin.
I don’t know what the university does to erase what they brought in with them . . .
but at the end of it all they don’t understand campesinos. Much of the time in Mexico,
for the simple fact of being an agronomist, they have to come to the community in a
truck, they have to wear boots, they don’t want to get dirty, they don’t want to get wet,
they don’t want to do anything like that. How can a man like this truly involve himself
in the campesino process if he doesn’t want to act like a campesino?
Q: What are some of the ideas and concepts that have been discussed here at this
workshop that you plan to bring to your community or your organization?
A: I think what I am understanding is that academia is thinking differently. I hope it’s
true – the idea that academia might want to involve itself in a real development that can
contribute to the process in which the campesinos are already engaged. . . . I believe that
it is possible. I take with me this idea that there is interest, that many academics are taking
action in different parts of the world related to the preservation of resources – but it’s
yale school of forestry & environmental studies