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

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agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty
A colonist farmer from the Amazon, a community gardener turned activist from New
York City, a Mexican immigrant from California, a Brazilian agroecological farming
expert, and an advocate of urban agriculture in Cuba shared their stories of hope,
invention, and social and political boundary-breaking. Their experiences
demonstrated that in today’s world of increasing economic and cultural integration
and environmental degradation, a “traditional” farmer is often an unlikely farmer.
These new farmers are merging their life experiences, lessons learned from social
movements, and economic constraints to build their own unique agricultural
strength. Agriculture for these farmers and advocates is not only about food
production, it encompasses building community and new alliances, redefining local
and global markets, and empowering farmers to own the processes by which their
standard of living, the health of their environment, and their livelihoods are
determined. In short, these new farmers are creating, piece-by-piece, truly
participatory democracies and a just global economy.
“We don’t talk about conquering
the market but relating to
it – creating a relationship with
it. Conquest is a process of loss,
the process of domination – we
don’t want this.”
– Sérgio Lopes
Redefining Farming in the Amazon
Sérgio Lopes, a colonist farmer from the western Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, and
former coordinator of the Reflorestamento Econômico Consorciado e Adensado
(RECA) project, presented the history of the project, its mission, and lessons learned.
RECA was developed to help colonist farmers – Amazon migrants from all parts of
Brazil – to overcome degraded agricultural land, inadequate technology and services,
lack of agricultural markets for small-scale production, and cultural differences
between the colonists and traditional Amazonian rubber tappers. The colonist farmers
of RECA are located in an area that includes the Brazilian states of Rondonia,
Acre, and Amazonas, and Bolivia. These farmers moved to the region under government
land colonization projects in the 1980s. Colonization began in the 1970s, when
cattle ranchers first settled in the region. At the time, Lopes explained, the government
believed no one lived in the forest. Yet traditional rubber tappers did live in the
forest, and conflicts broke out between ranchers and rubber tappers over resource
rights – and so began the rubber tappers’ years of struggle for land.
For the colonists, the struggle appeared different. They had received land from the
government. What they lacked was the conditions to work the land. Lopes and the
RECA network gained invaluable knowledge from the rubber tappers’ movement, but
realized the movement could not be theirs because of their different social history
and resource situation (e.g., the colonists cleared their land of trees, so they could not
extract rubber). The final conception of RECA, he explained, began with the foundation
that, as the poet says, “In the Amazon, we don’t need to reinvent the path, but we
have to find our own way of walking the path.” RECA created something new and
unique, but it learned from existing knowledge in the forest, the farmers’ union, and
the church, where rubber tappers and colonists met and exchanged ideas.
Since it was founded in 1984, RECA has worked to generate income for colonist
farmers, reforest degraded land, and produce a diversity of fruit products through
agroforestry. In the first years in the Amazon, the migrant farmers discovered that
direct planting of rice, corn, and beans – typical crops for smallholder farmers –
yale school of forestry & environmental studies