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

64
agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty
Much like the first encounter, the new meeting of
cultures is being forced on the Mixteca – this time
by a model of globalization based on European/
North American technologies and economic and
political commitments. The model clashes with the
Mixtec way of life and that of other land-based
indigenous cultures around the globe. And it has
the potential to be even more devastating than the
earlier encounters for these civilizations. The power
this model has to wrench indigenous peoples from
the land, using the tools of poverty and privatization,
is frighteningly evident. In the ten years since
Phil Dahl-Bredine. Photographer:
Steve Taylor.
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has hastened globalization here,
ample evidence of its destructive effects can be found in the Mixteca.
Nevertheless, the Mixtec campesino communities of rural Oaxaca still hold
important parts of their culture intact. Tequios, common work projects in which the
entire village participates, still help hold the social fabric together. Traditional “town
meeting” governance forms called usos y costumbres have returned in force. Gueza or
guelagetza, forms of mutual sharing in times of need, are still practiced, and land is
primarily communal in character. Individual accumulation of wealth for its own sake
is still a foreign notion. On the other hand, accumulation in order to give back to the
community during fiesta by being a mayordomo or a madrina, supporting some part
of the costs of the village patronal feast, is common. These indigenous communities
count their age in millennia. Some anthropologists compare their historical culture,
art, science, and literature favorably with those of ancient Egypt and Greece. The
Mixtec people are the only people of the Americas with 1,000 years of written history
still intact in their magnificent codices.
Recurrent in this history is the idea that the Mixtec society should adopt only
regionally appropriate technology and practices. A few days ago, I was in the home
village of Jesús León Santos, president of CEDICAM. He was showing me the springs
on which the village depends for water.
“We don’t have much water,” he explained. “But we don’t need much,
because we don’t have a sewer system.” I said to myself,“Ah, you mean that
you don’t have flush toilets. And if some well-meaning outsider had come
to relieve you all of your poverty and helped install civilized flush toilets,
the Mixtec communities of Tilantongo would have exhausted their water
supplies and ceased to exist decades ago!” The poverty of resources of the
Mixteca Alta made it abundantly clear that the flush toilet of Sr. Thomas
Crapper is no solution for the problem of human waste. It is only our wealth
of natural resources and money that make it possible for us to pretend that
it is a solution in the North.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies