FOR
AN AGRICULTURE THAT DOESN’T GET RID OF FARMERS
AN INTERVIEW WITH MIGUEL ALTIERI
Latin
America’s small farmers are an endangered species, even though they
provide most of the region’s food. Agroecologists think the farmers, and
their farms, can be saved by a combination of new science and millenial
methods.
By JoAnn Kawell
Among the forms of knowledge—sciences—developed in the Americas before the
arrival of the Europeans were sophisticated agricultural systems.
The
Incas, the Mayas and the Aztecs all developed systems capable
of feeding
large and concentrated populations. The European conquerors
partly
dismantled the indigenous systems and tried to substitute European
farming
techniques. More recently, would-be modernizers in Latin America
have
fostered the spread of U.S.-style agriculture, which favors
large farms,
expensive equipment like tractors and the purchase of ever-growing
amounts
of pesticides, fertilizers and, most recently, genetically
modified seeds.
Proponents say such "scientific" agriculture is the only way to feed the
world’s growing population, while critics charge that the only real
beneficiaries are the corporations that make farm supplies
and equipment.
Now, scattered throughout the developing world, experiments
are underway
with an alternative approach known as agroecology. Miguel Altieri,
author
of Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture, is
one of the
leading advocates of this new approach. The Chilean-born Altieri
is a
professor of insect biology at the University of California-Berkeley,
but
he spends almost half the year in Latin America, working with
hundreds of
farmers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that want
to try
agroecological methods. NACLA Report editor JoAnn Kawell recently
spoke
with Altieri about agroecology and its possible economic, social—and
political—implications for Latin America.
What is agroecology?
Miguel Altieri: We could say that agroecology is basically
just a set of
principles on how to design systems for small farmers.
The main motivation
for agroecology is that previous development projects have
failed, top-down
development projects have failed, and we need an alternative.
What
agroecology does is try to blend traditional knowledge,
the farmer’s
knowledge, and the principles of modern agricultural science.
The focus is on peasant agriculture, small farmers. That’s the important
form of agriculture in Latin America—there are only 16 million small
farmers in Latin America and they control only 20% of the
land, but they
are the ones who are producing the food that people eat
there, because
everyone else is growing for export. You go to Chile—what are the big
farmers doing? Producing wine, or grapes, or peaches,
or apples for export,
nothing for the local populations. Go to Brazil, what
are the big guys
doing? Growing soybeans for the export market. To do
what? To feed the
cattle in Europe. It doesn’t have anything to do with the food security of
the region. So the ones who are maintaining the food
security, genetic
diversity and the cultural diversity of the land are
the peasants—the
corporate model of biotechnology is an agriculture without
farmers.
Agroecology projects are very underfunded projects, conducted
by little
NGOs helping here and there, but they have been able
to reach about 4.5
million farmers throughout the developing world, farming
about nine million
hectares [one hectare = 2.5 acres]. We’ve participated in a study which
shows that by using agroecological methods you can
increase yields of poor
farmers in marginal environments about 100% while at
the same time
conserving the soil resource base and biodiversity.
But if agroecology emphasizes traditional methods,
and these are so
productive, why are Latin American farmers still
poor and still hungry?
MA:
Basically, the problem is the inequity of access to land. We’re
talking
about 16 million peasant family units. That’s about
75 million people;
that’s the population where the poverty’s concentrated,
and the average
farm size is between 1.2 and 1.5 hectares. You
can’t demand too much from
that 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 of
those areas is very low, they should be used for
other purposes, like
forest or grasslands. The main way to revive and
have a productive peasant
agriculture would be, first, land reform and second,
appropriate support
for these farmers, in terms of agroecological technologies,
credit, and
social services that come along with rural development.
But all the efforts that were made, starting with
the Green Revolution and
all the extension programs have bypassed the peasantry.
More than 80% of
Latin American peasants did not adopt high yielding
varieties, or the
pesticides or the fertilizers promoted by the Green
Revolution. The reason
wasn’t that these people were ignorant; it had an ecological basis, because
these 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 an
attempt by the Rockefeller Foundation to modernize
Mexican agriculture.
Rockefeller put together a team of people to
go to Mexico to report on how
to modernize. When they came back they recommended
that the way to do this
would be to bring technology from the North,
from the United States,
Iowa-type, Ohio-type agriculture, using hybrid
crops and making use of the
technology package that implies, to push yields.
There was one professor
from Berkeley, Carl Sauer, who passed away
many years ago, who was on that
team: He’d done a lot of research on Mexican agriculture, and he wrote a
minority report, saying, basically, "if a bunch of agressive American
agronomists are going to go to Mexico and bring
Ohio-type agriculture to
small farmers, this is what’s going to happen." He predicted the impacts of
the Green Revolution, the breakdown of cultures,
the breakdown of the
traditional systems, the erosion of the traditional
varieties—they kind of
fired 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—which
total about 3 million hectares in Latin America,
mainly in Mesoamerica, the
Andean region and the lowland tropics. One
system in Mesoamerica would be
the chinampas, there are about 40-60 hectares
left in an area near Mexico
City. A chinampa is a raised field that
is surrounded by water canals, it’s
a system that was developed by the Aztecs
and has withstood the test of
time. 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 the
bottom
of the canals, it’s very rich in organic matter; some of the
nutrients from the raised fields fall into
the water and enrich the water
for the fish, a lot of algae and weeds
start growing there, and before they
suffocate the fish, the farmers put that
organic matter back on the raised
field as mulch. It’s a self-sustaining system, and they’ve
been able to
obtain anywhere from three to six tons
per hectare, which is pretty
comparable 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 mostly
maize. Now they have mostly commercial
crops like flowers that they sell in
Mexico City. But the [chinampas] system
is collapsing. One, because of
urban sprawl, and also because of the
water quality. Mexico City uses the
water 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
is
still in place where the productivity
of potatoes is very high. The
diversity of potatoes is also very
high, they don’t grow one variety of
potato, they grow 60 or 70 varieties
in one terrace and that provides
resistance 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; cultural
rituals maintain diversity; for
example, a work ritual called
the minka:
Farmers from one area work in
another area, and they get paid
in potatoes
by the farmers who are hosting
the minka. Or when people marry,
they
get
different kinds of potatoes as
gifts. The survival of these
many varieties
is important not just for the
survival of the farmers but also
for the
survival of agriculture, because
it ensures genetic diversity.
In order
to
maintain that genetic diversity,
it’s important to maintain cultural
diversity, because if you destroy
these rituals, the way people
are
relating, 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’s
CIED [Center for Research,
Education and Development],
have reconstructed
hundreds of hectares of andenes.
How about tropical agriculture
systems?
MA: In the lowland tropics,
in the Amazon for example,
but also
in southern
Mexico, you will find agro-forest
systems, which are basically
home
gardens, huertos familiares,
which could be less than
half a hectare
surrounding the household
where you would have anywhere
between
80 and
200
different trees, herbs,
shrubs and a few domestic
animals.
These systems
have a huge amount of diversity
and are key for food security.
The image that most people
have of tropical agriculture
is that
it’s mostly
slash and burn agriculture.
Is that accurate?
MA: Well, slash and burn
is very prevalent,
mostly in the
highlands,
but
it’s diminishing because of the problem of land access, and population
growth. Originally
slash and burn was
a very sustainable
system. The key
thing is that in the
tropics there’s a lot of leaching of nutrients from
the 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
vegetation
into the soil; then
that vegetation decomposes
and releases the
nutrients.
So what the farmers
did originally was
to clear
a small plot
of land, burn
it. That releases the
nutrients in the vegetation.
The
soil has enough
fertility for about
three years, then they
would
abandon that
piece of
land, and come back
maybe 15 years later
to the
same piece
of land
so they
could allow the forest
to regenerate. That
system is
considered
sustainable. It’s prevalent in Asia and Africa, too. As long as you have
long fallows [periods
during which the fields
aren’t cultivated] the system
works very well. That’s a very ecologically rational way of managing
tropical agriculture.
The problem is that
the fallows
became
shorter and
shorter because of
lack of access to land,
population
growth, not
so much
because people are
reproducing like crazy,
but because
there’s been a lot
of movement of people
into areas where slash
and burn
is being
used— for
example, some of the
problems in the Brazilian
Amazon,
in Rondônia, it was
mostly landless people
that they were bringing
from the
south
to the
Amazon; they were people
without a culture of
tropical agriculture,
they
were doing slash and
burn without knowledge
and without
allowing
long
fallows. You can still
find microcosms of
sustainable slash and
burn—in
southern Mexico for
example, in Chiapas.
But in most
areas I think
that the
fallows have shortened
so much, that the system’s not sustainable any more.
You say that agroecology
combines traditional
and modern methods,
can you
say something about
the contribution
of modern
methods?
MA: That’s an interesting question, because sometimes the only contribution
that modern science
has is to show
that what
traditional farmers
have
been
doing is correct—we do the research and we find that what these people
developed were
optimal systems.
Let me give
you a concrete
example: The
waru warus, systems
found about 4,000
meters above
sea level
that exist
in
the Puno area of
Peru and in Bolivia,
in
the Lake
Titicaca area.
Waru warus
are very similar
to the chinampas—they are raised fields surrounded by
water that comes
from Lake Titicaca.
But
the main
effect is that
the water
absorbs the heat
during the day
and releases
it at night;
that
changes
the
microclimate one
or two degrees,
enough to offset
frost, which
is very
common at that
altitude. Those
systems disappeared
because
the Spanish
thought 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
work
reviving the systems.
There were archeological
records
that showed
that the
systems had existed.
Then they started
interviewing the
elderly
of the
communities, and
they started trying
to revive
the systems.
There are
now
more than 200 hectares
of waru warus,
which have been
reconstructed.
They’re growing their traditional crops again. The contribution of modern
science was just
to find a way of
reconstructing
how this
was
done.
No
modern scientific
breakthrough has
been made that
makes it possible
to grow
crops 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, because
agroecology is participatory—that means farmers are at the center of the
research agenda.
But in most places
where
we’re working, traditional
systems do not
exist anymore,
they have
been destroyed,
basically the
work
is to try to
rescue what was
there
before, and
if it’s not there, to use
agricultural
principles that
governed how
sustainable agriculture
was
practiced in
other areas with
similar
conditions.
What we have
to do is empower
the
poor
so they
have the
capability
to feed
themselves.
What needs
to be done
is, first,
land reform.
And second,
equip
the farmers
with agroecological
knowledge and
techniques.
NGOs
alone can’t
do this; there
have to be
huge institutional
reforms so
that
the public
apparatus supports
what the peasants
really need.
One
example of
a place
where this
is happening
is
in Brazil,
in the state
of
Rio Grande
do Sul,
where Governor
[Olivio] Dutra,
of the PT
[Workers’ Party] has made
agroecology
public policy—the research institutions and universities there
had people
who studied
agroecology,
these
people are
now
in power and
using
agroecology
as a tool for
family
farming.
In Brazil there
are 4.3 million
family
farmers
who control
about 30%
of the
land but
produce 80%
of the
cassava and
about 70%
of
the beans
and about
60% of the
maize. Their
responsibility
in food
security,
as in the
rest
of
Latin America,
is critical.
What Dutra
and the
PT have seen
is that
the
family
farmers
play a key
role
in food
security;
they see
that the
revival
of small
farms in
the
countryside
is key
to reversing
poverty,
because
many people
are migrating
to the
cities,
but the
cities
are becoming
pockets
of poverty.
What
are
they going
to do with
all those
people?
They want
to revive
agriculture
and
add other
industries
that are
going to
add value
to the
agricultural
products,
bring education,
bring all
the
services
that have
to come
along;
that’s their strategy, that rural development plays a key role in the
development
of the
state.
So
it’s not so much that the family farmers
represent
a huge
economic
force;
but they
represent
a social
and ecological
and cultural
force.
I think
what
they are
doing
is very
wise—the public sector, which is
shrinking
everywhere
in Latin
America,
due to
neoliberal
policies,
should
focus
on the
poor,
because
the rest
are being
taken
care
of
by the
corporations.
So for
example
in
Chile,
why is
the national
agriculture
institute
helping
big farmers?
Why don’t they work with small farmers? The
corporations
have
their
own technical
assistance.
Agroecology
is not
just
a
development
method,
but also
a resistance
to
globalization,
a tool
for
social
movements
to become
much
more
autonomous.
Brazil’s MST [Landless
Rural
Workers
Movement]
is now
using
agroecology
on
land
they’ve taken
over.
The Zapatistas
use agroecology—it is the technological flag of the
resistance
movement.
Is it
possible
for
large scale
commercial
farms
and
small farmers
to
coexist?
Isn’t Rio Grande do Sul a big commercial soybean producing region?
MA:
Yes,
it
is.
And
coexistence
is
possible.
The
MST
is
the
strongest
movement
in
Brazil,
including
in
Rio
Grande
do
Sul;
they
are
taking
over
land
there.
So
you
will
have
large
scale
agriculture
that’s corrected by
land
reform—and when it’s corrected, then you will have the coexistence of
large,
medium
and
small
scale
agriculture.
Do
you
see
genetically
modified
crops
as
having
any
role
at
all
in
the
systems
you
are
talking
about
in
Latin
America?
MA:
Well, agroecology
emerged as
a critique
of top-down
approaches like
the
Green
Revolution, which
bypassed the
small farmers,
and did
not really
help
them.
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 the
technology
to be
useful, first
of all
it has
to be
participatory, that
is,
the
peasants get
involved in
the research
process and
they bring
their
knowledge—they are the ones who decide what is to be done, and all the
other
agencies, NGOs
and research
centers should
be just
facilitating the
process.
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
other
products:
like [Monsanto’s] Roundup Ready soybeans; it’s patented and
requires
the use
of one
particular herbicide,
Roundup [also
made by
Monsanto].
So in
that sense
this technology
has nothing
to do
with the
needs
of the
poor.
There
are people
arguing, well,
but look,
there are
applications that
could
be
useful—but if a public organization, let’s say a Bolivian research
center,
developed a
variety of
potato that
was going
to be
distributed to
the
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
are
going
to come
down and
claim property
rights—because the associated
[genetic
engineering] technology
is patented;
when you
put in
the gene
that
has
the particular
feature you
want, you
have to
use patented
technology to
insert
it and
mark it.
This is
what happened
exactly with
two varieties
of
papaya,
one developed
by a
government agency
in Brazil
and another
by a
public
university in
Costa Rica;
they could
not release
them because
they
had
to negotiate
the patents
with 20
different corporations.
That’s what
happened
with Golden
Rice, this
rice that
is engineered
to have
the vitamin
beta
carotene; the
Rockefeller Foundation
funded the
research for
ten
years,
and then
when they
were ready
to release
Golden Rice
they found
out
that
there were
complicated issues
with the
patents, so
that’s why [the
Swiss
company] AstroZeneca
came in
and bought
it. What
they’re saying now
is "we’re going to give Golden Rice to the poor for free," but we can’t
allow
feeding the
poor in
Latin America
to be
a question
of whether
corporations
have good
will or
not. Agroecology
empowers people
to become
agents
of their
own development.
But
the other
problem with
biotech, with
GMOs [Genetically
Modified
Organisms]
is that
they are
emerging at
the expense
of other
agriculture,
because
of genetic
pollution, we
are seeing
it already
with the
local maize
varities
in Oaxaca
[Mexico]. When
we grow
transgenic crops
that have
a
special
trait, the
gene for
that trait
doesn’t necessarily come from other
plants,
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 one
particular
trait, like
resistance to
an herbicide,
or to
a pest;
well, that
gene
expresses itself
throughout the
plant and
especially in
the pollen.
So
when
the pollen
is blown
by wind
or carried
by pollinators
and goes
through
a
normal process
of crossing
with wild
relatives—that is, plants that are
botanically
related to
the crop—there’s a high probability of encountering
wild
relatives in
Latin America
because there
are many
centers of
origin
[of
domesticated plants]
that are
loaded with
wild relatives
and local
varieties—so there’s going to be exchange of genes. And the wild plants are
going
to acquire
the trait—they could become superweeds, and take over, or
they
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 never
exist
in nature
if humans
had not
manipulated them.
They’ve manipulated
them
by overcoming
biological barriers;
people say, "but people have been
domesticating
and improving
plants for
a long
time." Yeah, they have, but
through
the normal
co-evolutionary
processes
that exist
in nature.
Here we
have
crossed biological
barriers and
found ways
to use
viruses and
other
things
that would
serve as
transporters
of
these genes.
So
what’s happening in Oaxaca, the center of origin of maize, an area with
a
lot of
diversity
of
maize, and
teosinte,
which
is a
wild relative,
is
that
they were
using GM
corn for
animal feed,
supposedly.
This
GM
corn—called Bt corn—is resistant to insect pests. It started contaminating
other
corn varieties
because of
exchange of
genes [through
pollination];
researchers
in Oaxaca
found the
presence of
GM material
in traditional
varieties
and wild
relatives.
We
don’t know what the consequences could be,
they
could become
superweeds,
or
they could
disappear
because
they lose
fitness.
What is
more worrisome
is that
they’ll contaminate everything so
that
there’s nothing we can do later on—regulation will come too late,
farmers
are going
to lose
their traditional
crops. Organic
farmers are
also
being
contaminated;
this
is happening
in Canada,
with canola.
The farmers
lose
their organic
certification,
because
organic crops
aren’t allowed to
have
any contamination
by GMOs.
So this
is imposing
itself—it’s like
Microsoft—it’s imposing itself all over the genetic material of Latin
America,
and that’s unacceptable. We need to contain the purity of farming
systems
the way
farmers want
them—it’s irreversible, once you release the
genes
into the
environment,
it’s irreversible.
More
information
about
agroecology and
Miguel Altieri’s work in Latin
America
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
NORTH
AMERICAN
CONGRESS
ON LATIN
AMERICA
475
RIVERSIDE
DRIVE,
SUITE
454
NEW
YORK
NY 10115
TEL:
(212)
870-3146
/ FAX
(212)
870-3305
WRITE
TO
US! Created
By
