FOR AN
AGRICULTURE THAT DOESN’T GET RID OF FARMERSAN
INTERVIEW WITH MIGUEL ALTIERI
Latin
America’s small farmers are an endangered species, even though theyprovide
most of the region’s food. Agroecologists think the farmers, andtheir
farms, can be saved by a combination of new science and millenialmethods.
By JoAnn Kawell
Among
the forms of knowledge—sciences—developed in the Americas before thearrival
of the Europeans were sophisticated agricultural systems. TheIncas,
the Mayas and the Aztecs all developed systems capable of feedinglarge
and concentrated populations. The European conquerors partlydismantled
the indigenous systems and tried to substitute European farmingtechniques.
More recently, would-be modernizers in Latin America havefostered
the spread of U.S.-style agriculture, which favors large farms,expensive
equipment like tractors and the purchase of ever-growing amountsof
pesticides, fertilizers and, most recently, genetically modified seeds.Proponents
say such "scientific" agriculture is the only way to feed
theworld’s growing population, while critics charge that the only
realbeneficiaries are the corporations that make farm supplies and
equipment.Now, scattered throughout the developing world, experiments
are underwaywith an alternative approach known as agroecology. Miguel
Altieri, authorof Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture,
is one of theleading advocates of this new approach. The Chilean-born
Altieri is aprofessor of insect biology at the University of California-Berkeley,
buthe spends almost half the year in Latin America, working with hundreds
offarmers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that want to tryagroecological
methods. NACLA Report editor JoAnn Kawell recently spokewith Altieri
about agroecology and its possible economic, social—andpolitical—implications
for Latin America.
What
is agroecology?Miguel Altieri: We could say that agroecology is basically
just a set ofprinciples on how to design systems for small farmers.
The main motivationfor agroecology is that previous development projects
have failed, top-downdevelopment projects have failed, and we need
an alternative. Whatagroecology does is try to blend traditional knowledge,
the farmer’sknowledge, and the principles of modern agricultural science.
The
focus is on peasant agriculture, small farmers. That’s the importantform
of agriculture in Latin America—there are only 16 million smallfarmers
in Latin America and they control only 20% of the land, but theyare
the ones who are producing the food that people eat there, becauseeveryone
else is growing for export. You go to Chile—what are the bigfarmers
doing? Producing wine, or grapes, or peaches, or apples for export,nothing
for the local populations. Go to Brazil, what are the big guysdoing?
Growing soybeans for the export market. To do what? To feed thecattle
in Europe. It doesn’t have anything to do with the food security ofthe
region. So the ones who are maintaining the food security, geneticdiversity
and the cultural diversity of the land are the peasants—thecorporate
model of biotechnology is an agriculture without farmers.
Agroecology
projects are very underfunded projects, conducted by littleNGOs helping
here and there, but they have been able to reach about 4.5million
farmers throughout the developing world, farming about nine millionhectares
[one hectare = 2.5 acres]. We’ve participated in a study whichshows
that by using agroecological methods you can increase yields of poorfarmers
in marginal environments about 100% while at the same timeconserving
the soil resource base and biodiversity.
But
if agroecology emphasizes traditional methods, and these are soproductive,
why are Latin American farmers still poor and still hungry?MA: Basically,
the problem is the inequity of access to land. We’re talkingabout
16 million peasant family units. That’s about 75 million people;that’s
the population where the poverty’s concentrated, and the averagefarm
size is between 1.2 and 1.5 hectares. You can’t demand too much fromthat
little land, especially marginal land. About 80% of the small farmers,the
peasants, in Latin America are concentrated in the marginal lands:hillsides,
semi-desert areas, etc. Obviously the agricultural potential ofthose
areas is very low, they should be used for other purposes, likeforest
or grasslands. The main way to revive and have a productive peasantagriculture
would be, first, land reform and second, appropriate supportfor these
farmers, in terms of agroecological technologies, credit, andsocial
services that come along with rural development.
But
all the efforts that were made, starting with the Green Revolution
andall the extension programs have bypassed the peasantry. More than
80% ofLatin American peasants did not adopt high yielding varieties,
or thepesticides or the fertilizers promoted by the Green Revolution.
The reasonwasn’t that these people were ignorant; it had an ecological
basis, becausethese technologies would increase the risk for them.
Can
you explain what the Green Revolution was?MA: The Green Revolution
started, in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, as anattempt by the Rockefeller
Foundation to modernize Mexican agriculture.Rockefeller put together
a team of people to go to Mexico to report on howto modernize. When
they came back they recommended that the way to do thiswould be to
bring technology from the North, from the United States,Iowa-type,
Ohio-type agriculture, using hybrid crops and making use of thetechnology
package that implies, to push yields. There was one professorfrom
Berkeley, Carl Sauer, who passed away many years ago, who was on thatteam:
He’d done a lot of research on Mexican agriculture, and he wrote aminority
report, saying, basically, "if a bunch of agressive Americanagronomists
are going to go to Mexico and bring Ohio-type agriculture tosmall
farmers, this is what’s going to happen." He predicted the impacts
ofthe Green Revolution, the breakdown of cultures, the breakdown of
thetraditional systems, the erosion of the traditional varieties—they
kind offired him, and the Green Revolution proceeded.
Give
us some examples of places where traditional systems are still in
use.MA: Traditional systems are almost intact in small areas—microcosms—whichtotal
about 3 million hectares in Latin America, mainly in Mesoamerica,
theAndean region and the lowland tropics. One system in Mesoamerica
would bethe chinampas, there are about 40-60 hectares left in an area
near MexicoCity. A chinampa is a raised field that is surrounded by
water canals, it’sa system that was developed by the Aztecs and has
withstood the test oftime. It’s an integrated agricultural/aquaculture
system.
Meaning
it produces both crops and fish?MA: Right. The raised fields are built
with the mucky sediment from thebottom of the canals, it’s very rich
in organic matter; some of thenutrients from the raised fields fall
into the water and enrich the waterfor the fish, a lot of algae and
weeds start growing there, and before theysuffocate the fish, the
farmers put that organic matter back on the raisedfield as mulch.
It’s a self-sustaining system, and they’ve been able toobtain anywhere
from three to six tons per hectare, which is prettycomparable to any
average maize [corn] field in the United States.
What
kind of crops do they grow in the chinampas?MA: They now grow about
20 different crops, but originally it was mostlymaize. Now they have
mostly commercial crops like flowers that they sell inMexico City.
But the [chinampas] system is collapsing. One, because ofurban sprawl,
and also because of the water quality. Mexico City uses thewater and
returns it contaminated, and so the systems are breaking down,not
because the systems don’t work, but because of external forces.
How
about systems in the Andes?MA: The most traditional system in the
Andes is the terraces, the andenes.The main crop is potatoes, and
there are places where the terrace system isstill in place where the
productivity of potatoes is very high. Thediversity of potatoes is
also very high, they don’t grow one variety ofpotato, they grow 60
or 70 varieties in one terrace and that providesresistance to environmental
problems, like drought or frost or disease,because one variety might
suffer, but many others would survive.
That
diversity exists not so much as a result of the ecology; culturalrituals
maintain diversity; for example, a work ritual called the minka:Farmers
from one area work in another area, and they get paid in potatoesby
the farmers who are hosting the minka. Or when people marry, they
getdifferent kinds of potatoes as gifts. The survival of these many
varietiesis important not just for the survival of the farmers but
also for thesurvival of agriculture, because it ensures genetic diversity.
In order tomaintain that genetic diversity, it’s important to maintain
culturaldiversity, because if you destroy these rituals, the way people
arerelating, you break down the genetic diversity.
Is there
a particular area where you’ve been working on terraces?MA: In the
Huancayo and Cajamarca areas of Peru there are still microcosms,not
the whole area, but there are still small areas. NGOs, including Peru’sCIED
[Center for Research, Education and Development], have reconstructedhundreds
of hectares of andenes.
How
about tropical agriculture systems?MA: In the lowland tropics, in
the Amazon for example, but also in southernMexico, you will find
agro-forest systems, which are basically homegardens, huertos familiares,
which could be less than half a hectaresurrounding the household where
you would have anywhere between 80 and 200different trees, herbs,
shrubs and a few domestic animals. These systemshave a huge amount
of diversity and are key for food security.
The
image that most people have of tropical agriculture is that it’s mostlyslash
and burn agriculture. Is that accurate?MA: Well, slash and burn is
very prevalent, mostly in the highlands, butit’s diminishing because
of the problem of land access, and populationgrowth. Originally slash
and burn was a very sustainable system. The keything is that in the
tropics there’s a lot of leaching of nutrients fromthe soil, the nutrients
are tied up in the biomass, that is in the plants,so if you want to
have fertile soil, you have to incorporate vegetationinto the soil;
then that vegetation decomposes and releases the nutrients.So what
the farmers did originally was to clear a small plot of land, burnit.
That releases the nutrients in the vegetation. The soil has enoughfertility
for about three years, then they would abandon that piece ofland,
and come back maybe 15 years later to the same piece of land so theycould
allow the forest to regenerate. That system is consideredsustainable.
It’s prevalent in Asia and Africa, too. As long as you havelong fallows
[periods during which the fields aren’t cultivated] the systemworks
very well. That’s a very ecologically rational way of managingtropical
agriculture. The problem is that the fallows became shorter andshorter
because of lack of access to land, population growth, not so muchbecause
people are reproducing like crazy, but because there’s been a lotof
movement of people into areas where slash and burn is being used—
forexample, some of the problems in the Brazilian Amazon, in Rondônia,
it wasmostly landless people that they were bringing from the south
to theAmazon; they were people without a culture of tropical agriculture,
theywere doing slash and burn without knowledge and without allowing
longfallows. You can still find microcosms of sustainable slash and
burn—insouthern Mexico for example, in Chiapas. But in most areas
I think that thefallows have shortened so much, that the system’s
not sustainable any more.
You
say that agroecology combines traditional and modern methods, can
yousay something about the contribution of modern methods?MA: That’s
an interesting question, because sometimes the only contributionthat
modern science has is to show that what traditional farmers have beendoing
is correct—we do the research and we find that what these peopledeveloped
were optimal systems. Let me give you a concrete example: Thewaru
warus, systems found about 4,000 meters above sea level that exist
inthe Puno area of Peru and in Bolivia, in the Lake Titicaca area.
Waru warusare very similar to the chinampas—they are raised fields
surrounded bywater that comes from Lake Titicaca. But the main effect
is that the waterabsorbs the heat during the day and releases it at
night; that changes themicroclimate one or two degrees, enough to
offset frost, which is verycommon at that altitude. Those systems
disappeared because the Spanishthought the crops that they were growing,
like quinoa, were pagan crops.And for other reasons related to the
Conquest, those cultures collapsed,and the waru warus were abandoned.
A few years ago some anthropologists,some archeologists, and some
people from NGOs there started doing some workreviving the systems.
There were archeological records that showed that thesystems had existed.
Then they started interviewing the elderly of thecommunities, and
they started trying to revive the systems. There are nowmore than
200 hectares of waru warus, which have been reconstructed.They’re
growing their traditional crops again. The contribution of modernscience
was just to find a way of reconstructing how this was done. Nomodern
scientific breakthrough has been made that makes it possible to growcrops
at those altitudes in the midst of frost.
But
agroecology isn’t entirely a preservation of traditional systems?MA:
No. It’s possible to preserve the systems, if the farmers want, becauseagroecology
is participatory—that means farmers are at the center of theresearch
agenda. But in most places where we’re working, traditionalsystems
do not exist anymore, they have been destroyed, basically the workis
to try to rescue what was there before, and if it’s not there, to
useagricultural principles that governed how sustainable agriculture
waspracticed in other areas with similar conditions.
What
we have to do is empower the poor so they have the capability to feedthemselves.
What needs to be done is, first, land reform. And second, equipthe
farmers with agroecological knowledge and techniques. NGOs alone can’tdo
this; there have to be huge institutional reforms so that the publicapparatus
supports what the peasants really need. One example of a placewhere
this is happening is in Brazil, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul,where
Governor [Olivio] Dutra, of the PT [Workers’ Party] has madeagroecology
public policy—the research institutions and universities therehad
people who studied agroecology, these people are now in power and
usingagroecology as a tool for family farming.
In Brazil
there are 4.3 million family farmers who control about 30% of theland
but produce 80% of the cassava and about 70% of the beans and about60%
of the maize. Their responsibility in food security, as in the rest
ofLatin America, is critical.
What
Dutra and the PT have seen is that the family farmers play a key rolein
food security; they see that the revival of small farms in thecountryside
is key to reversing poverty, because many people are migratingto the
cities, but the cities are becoming pockets of poverty. What arethey
going to do with all those people? They want to revive agriculture
andadd other industries that are going to add value to the agriculturalproducts,
bring education, bring all the services that have to come along;that’s
their strategy, that rural development plays a key role in thedevelopment
of the state. So it’s not so much that the family farmersrepresent
a huge economic force; but they represent a social and ecologicaland
cultural force.
I think
what they are doing is very wise—the public sector, which isshrinking
everywhere in Latin America, due to neoliberal policies, shouldfocus
on the poor, because the rest are being taken care of by thecorporations.
So for example in Chile, why is the national agricultureinstitute
helping big farmers? Why don’t they work with small farmers? Thecorporations
have their own technical assistance. Agroecology is not just adevelopment
method, but also a resistance to globalization, a tool forsocial movements
to become much more autonomous. Brazil’s MST [LandlessRural Workers
Movement] is now using agroecology on land they’ve takenover. The
Zapatistas use agroecology—it is the technological flag of theresistance
movement.
Is it
possible for large scale commercial farms and small farmers tocoexist?
Isn’t Rio Grande do Sul a big commercial soybean producing region?MA:
Yes, it is. And coexistence is possible. The MST is the strongestmovement
in Brazil, including in Rio Grande do Sul; they are taking overland
there. So you will have large scale agriculture that’s corrected byland
reform—and when it’s corrected, then you will have the coexistence
oflarge, medium and small scale agriculture.
Do you
see genetically modified crops as having any role at all in thesystems
you are talking about in Latin America?MA: Well, agroecology emerged
as a critique of top-down approaches like theGreen Revolution, which
bypassed the small farmers, and did not really helpthem. And the same
thing is going on with biotechnology; it’s top down,it’s not participatory.
What we’re saying is that in order for thetechnology to be useful,
first of all it has to be participatory, that is,the peasants get
involved in the research process and they bring theirknowledge—they
are the ones who decide what is to be done, and all theother agencies,
NGOs and research centers should be just facilitating theprocess.
Biotechnology
did not emerge at all as a response to the needs of the poor;it emerged
as a tool for some corporations to control the food system.Because
they are able to engineer crops that require the use of their otherproducts:
like [Monsanto’s] Roundup Ready soybeans; it’s patented andrequires
the use of one particular herbicide, Roundup [also made byMonsanto].
So in that sense this technology has nothing to do with theneeds of
the poor.
There
are people arguing, well, but look, there are applications that couldbe
useful—but if a public organization, let’s say a Bolivian researchcenter,
developed a variety of potato that was going to be distributed tothe
poor and was, say, viral resistant, when they were ready to release
it,then you are going to have to deal with about 20 corporations that
aregoing to come down and claim property rights—because the associated[genetic
engineering] technology is patented; when you put in the gene thathas
the particular feature you want, you have to use patented technology
toinsert it and mark it. This is what happened exactly with two varieties
ofpapaya, one developed by a government agency in Brazil and another
by apublic university in Costa Rica; they could not release them because
theyhad to negotiate the patents with 20 different corporations. That’s
whathappened with Golden Rice, this rice that is engineered to have
the vitaminbeta carotene; the Rockefeller Foundation funded the research
for tenyears, and then when they were ready to release Golden Rice
they found outthat there were complicated issues with the patents,
so that’s why [theSwiss company] AstroZeneca came in and bought it.
What they’re saying nowis "we’re going to give Golden Rice to
the poor for free," but we can’tallow feeding the poor in Latin
America to be a question of whethercorporations have good will or
not. Agroecology empowers people to becomeagents of their own development.
But
the other problem with biotech, with GMOs [Genetically ModifiedOrganisms]
is that they are emerging at the expense of other agriculture,because
of genetic pollution, we are seeing it already with the local maizevarities
in Oaxaca [Mexico]. When we grow transgenic crops that have aspecial
trait, the gene for that trait doesn’t necessarily come from otherplants,
it might be from a bacteria, from a frog, from anything.
You
put that gene into a plant because you think it’s going to express
oneparticular trait, like resistance to an herbicide, or to a pest;
well, thatgene expresses itself throughout the plant and especially
in the pollen. Sowhen the pollen is blown by wind or carried by pollinators
and goes througha normal process of crossing with wild relatives—that
is, plants that arebotanically related to the crop—there’s a high
probability of encounteringwild relatives in Latin America because
there are many centers of origin[of domesticated plants] that are
loaded with wild relatives and localvarieties—so there’s going to
be exchange of genes. And the wild plants aregoing to acquire the
trait—they could become superweeds, and take over, orthey might become
less fit and just disappear. So that’s a danger.
The
GM crops are novel crops—they don’t exist in nature, they would neverexist
in nature if humans had not manipulated them. They’ve manipulatedthem
by overcoming biological barriers; people say, "but people have
beendomesticating and improving plants for a long time." Yeah,
they have, butthrough the normal co-evolutionary processes that exist
in nature. Here wehave crossed biological barriers and found ways
to use viruses and otherthings that would serve as transporters of
these genes.
So what’s
happening in Oaxaca, the center of origin of maize, an area witha
lot of diversity of maize, and teosinte, which is a wild relative,
isthat they were using GM corn for animal feed, supposedly. This GMcorn—called
Bt corn—is resistant to insect pests. It started contaminatingother
corn varieties because of exchange of genes [through pollination];researchers
in Oaxaca found the presence of GM material in traditionalvarieties
and wild relatives. We don’t know what the consequences could be,they
could become superweeds, or they could disappear because they losefitness.
What is more worrisome is that they’ll contaminate everything sothat
there’s nothing we can do later on—regulation will come too late,farmers
are going to lose their traditional crops. Organic farmers are alsobeing
contaminated; this is happening in Canada, with canola. The farmerslose
their organic certification, because organic crops aren’t allowed
tohave any contamination by GMOs. So this is imposing itself—it’s
likeMicrosoft—it’s imposing itself all over the genetic material of
LatinAmerica, and that’s unacceptable. We need to contain the purity
of farmingsystems the way farmers want them—it’s irreversible, once
you release thegenes into the environment, it’s irreversible.
More
information about agroecology and Miguel Altieri’s work in LatinAmerica
can be found at :
http://www.CNR.Berkeley.EDU/%7Eagroeco3/
http://www.agroeco.org/
Vol.
35, No. 5 March/April 2002 NACLA Report on the Americas
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