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Food sovereignty or food autarchy is still a political pipe
dream, but not a slogan. Via Campesina, a global grassroots
movement of small family farmers and campesinos, has been
lobbying the international system for several years on behalf
of family and peasant farming, biodiversity and indigenous
people. It has made food sovereignty a respected policy option
in societies struggling to get out of the colonial legacy
of the plantations, whereby most of the best land is still
in the hands of a few families or corporations.
Seen in this spirit, food self-reliance or sovereignty focuses
attention on the dangerous imbalance between the massive accumulation
of land and power by agribusiness and cash-crop plantations,
the near landlessness and landlessness of peasants in the
tropics, and the precarious status of small family farmers
in North America and Europe. Food sovereignty, in fact, captures
the expectations of peasant culture and of small family farmers,
especially those pushed to the brink of extinction. For example,
the number of black farmers in the United States declined
by 98 percent in the twentieth century.
This threat strikes a sensitive chord in the culture of Mexican
campesinos because campesinos rely on crops like corn and
beans that are embedded in their land and religion and life,
allowing no loss of land without disastrous consequences.
Corn and beans, for example, are indispensable in the life
of the Mexican campesino and in the life of Mexico. While
in Mexico City attending a Rural Coalition conference on peasant
and family farming, my colleagues and I ate beans and corn
three times a day.
Corn is Mexico, and Mexico is corn. Thus bringing into Mexico—especially
in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, two of Mexico’s
most impoverished regions—“free trade” that
auctions peasant land like it was a commodity is an invitation
to the dissolution of Mexican culture (and Mexico).
Corn was the chief topic of complaint of the campesinos at
the Rural Coalition conference. Attendees worried about the
introduction into Mexico of American corn, produced so cheaply
by state-subsidized giant agribusiness firms and large farmers
in America that it competes nicely with Mexico’s own
campesino corn. They blamed the North American Free Trade
Agreement for that, demanding that NAFTA be renegotiated,
leaving agriculture alone. They worried also that the imported
American corn, mostly hybrid and genetically engineered, could
contaminate their corn—the center of origin of zea mays—with
catastrophic consequences.
However, what touched me the most was the campesinos’
quiet determination of maintaining their culture, defending
their sacred corn, practicing and living (to the degree they
could) food sovereignty, teaching each other, and bringing
to their communities the encouraging message of the Rural
Coalition that other people like them—those from North
America—cared for them. Nothing could be higher than
that. They heard of the problems North American black and
Hispanic farmers and farm workers faced, so they knew they
were brothers and sisters in everything.
Listening to a campesina proudly defending her way of life,
how she planned to give encouragement to other women in her
village, a little bit every day, reminded me of the lessons
taught, in the 1960s, by the famous Brazilian anthropologist
Paulo Freire, lessons of consciousness-raising: understanding
one’s needs, building one’s moral character, self-esteem,
solidarity, and resisting the intruders. I told her that and
she nearly cried, hugging me and thanking me. I did the same
thing back, thanking her for her courage and wisdom.
The agrarian hope, I said later on to myself, had a future
in Mexico where 25 million campesinos still raise food or
live in the countryside close to those raising food. The import
of US corn is making campesinos landless, forcing them to
become illegal migrants to the US, something that is good
neither for them nor us. They also resent their forced destitution.
American corn, however, is politicizing more Mexicans than
the campesinos. The result is that Mexico is not quiet at
all, having “elected” two presidents, one elected
by the elite, who is likely to succeed Vicente Fox. This man
got the support of those who see NAFTA as a good thing; the
other, the campesinos’ president, received the votes
of the suffering majority. The two presidents provoke daily
protests, anxiety, solidarity and discussion. Above all, the
majority of Mexicans resort to actions of resistance that
are making a difference in protecting Mexico’s corn,
putting a brake in the corporate agenda of expelling the campesinos
from the land. So the campesinas’ quiet determination
is the determination of millions.
E.G. Vallianatos
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