Miguel Altieri, Ph.D., a pioneer in developing the concept and best practices of Agroecology, was born in Chile and teaches at UC Berkeley. He is the General Coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme's Sustainable Agriculture Networking and Extension Programme and the author of many articles and books on agroecology including Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture and other books.
AM: You do a lot of work in Latin America with farmers. How are Latin American farmers dealing with the pressures of globalization?
Miguel: In Latin America we have a dual agriculture. There is large-scale commercial sector of agriculture and also what we call the peasants, or small farmer sector. The small farmers are responsible for the food security of the region. About 60 percent of the corn, beans and potatoes—most of the food crops—are grown by the small farmers. The large-scale farmers are basically trapped in the agro-export model. They are the biggest users of the pesticides and fertilizers and also now the transgenic crops, particularly soybeans in Brazil and Argentina.
Globalization forces countries to embrace the agro export model putting importance on the so-called comparative advantage of the country. The comparative advantages of developing countries are the climate, the off-season in relationship to the North, cheap labor and cheap natural resources. The market sends a signal, which is the demand for products, and which determines what is grown In Latin America—coffee, wine and so on. But that model doesn’t do anything for food security.
Latin America has a large population and it’s becoming more and more urbanized and there are large numbers of poor people. The big challenge is how we’re going to feed them. This is where the peasant farming sector comes in. First of all it’s a model for food security. It’s also a model for pushing an alternative agenda for development that is based on knowledge and local resources. This is not something that the government started pushing, with the exception of the new governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, which are talking about these issues now and support small-scale agriculture as a basis of economic development. What has been driving the whole farming revolution in Latin America is the farmers themselves. It’s the right of the countries, the people, the farmers and consumers to grow what they want and to have access to food. There needs to be big political changes. One of those big political changes is access to land through land reform. And that’s exactly what is happening in Brazil, not because the government is doing a large-scale land reform, but because there’s a large grassroots movement called the Landless Workers Movement or the MST, which takes over land. One million farmers have already taken more than 10 million hectares of land. And now in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, land reform is part of the policies of the governments.
AM: How does land reform work in Brazil?
Miguel: In Brazil there is a concept that land has a social function. It is legal in Brazil to take over land that is not performing a social function, so the MST takes over land that is left unproductive. The government steps in and provides the titles and negotiates with the owners because they didn’t comply with the social function of the land. So MST gets the land title.
Most of the land that is left unproductive is the worst farmland. So many of the MST farmers have to regenerate the land quality before they can do agriculture. At first when the MST took over the land, they continued with industrial mono-agriculture. They even grew transgenic soybeans. But now there is a big push to transform all those 10 million hectares into organic agriculture, to agro ecological production systems, diversified systems to close the local circuits of production and consumption.
AM: How else are Latin American farmers and others working to change how food is grown and distributed?
Miguel: A lot of NGOs and local governments are supporting those efforts, but at the same time Via Campesina itself feels the need to train their young people in agroecology, so they have created a university in Venezuela where there will be scholarships for 500 sons and daughters of farmers of Via Campesina to study five years of agroecology at this new university. The reason they’re creating a new university is because the state and the national universities are not responding to the needs of farmers. The farmers gave up on those universities. They pressured the government, which gave them $20 million. That’s very important because farmers are saying, “You didn’t respond to our needs. We’re going to create our own institutions and whoever is committed in the academic world to support us will.” There are a lot of people that want to collaborate with that movement. So that’s something revolutionary that is happening in the region.
There are ecological initiatives, many within the realm of food, especially for local production and consumption. They are trying to free themselves from the signals and dictates of the market. And for that reason a lot of local governments and municipalities that have a lot of autonomy in many countries in Latin America are pushing for the institutional market. They spend a lot of money on food that is being served in schools, hospitals and jails. So why not spend that money with small farmers instead of a corporation selling junk food.
In Brazil, they have two ministries of agriculture. They have the Ministry of Agriculture, which deals with soybeans for export, genetically engineered crops, biodiesel and all that. And there’s the Ministry of Rural Development, which deals with the small farmers, which are 80 percent of the farmers in the country, but who only control about 30 percent of the land. The Ministry of Rural Development has more resources than the Ministry of Agriculture; and they are the ones promoting agroecology as the basis for extension and research among small farmers. So they receive a lot of credit. They provide loans, training and extension services to small farmers. Brazil and Cuba are the countries where the agroecological approach now reaches at least 50 percent of the farmers in those countries.
We are seeing in Brazil at this point where those farmers are starting to increase in numbers, increase in income. The Brazilian government purchases from the small farmers a certain amount of the production, which is distributed through the Zero Hunger program for the really poor people. The institutional markets provide small farmers a guaranteed income because they make contracts with the school districts and don’t have to compete in other markets. They don’t have to enter into the logic of the capitalist market. They just enter into a different logic and their income is secure and they now are responsible to produce the food, to supply it on time and meet the quantity and quality requirements. Also they have to diversify because they can’t just serve vegetables at the institutions. They have to serve cheese and ham and milk and yogurt, etc. So that creates a whole new infrastructure of small industries, which are also supported by the government.
In many cases the government also supports the farmers markets. A lot of farmers have problems in participating in the markets because they lack transportation. So some local municipalities provide transportation and then they give the farmer a space free of charge in order for them to create the market and then they sell the food cheaper than conventional. That creates what is called the solidarity movement between the consumers and the producers. The whole network is called Ecovita, which is consumers and farmers coming together having what is called a solidarity certification. They certify based on trust.
They’re doing their best to grow healthy food without chemicals. And there is loyalty in the fact that there are consumers that are going to be supporting those farmers. And because of that, farmers are able to sell their produce cheaper than conventional, and that creates a mutual relationship between those groups.
AM: What is happening in Latin America in terms of preserving the genetics of traditional, heirloom agricultural crops?
Miguel: Conservancy requires not only access to land, but also access to seeds and water. Obviously the access is not to the seeds of the multinational companies, but to the genetics that have been part of the culture and part of the traditional systems of Latin American. Latin America is the center of origin of maize and potatoes and many, many, crops. There are thousands of local varieties of these crops that are well adapted to the local conditions and grow without inputs. That’s part of the traditional system. The seeds evolved with farmer management for centuries. One of the advantages that peasant agriculture has over organic agriculture is that they have the germ plasma. In many cases when you convert to organic agriculture half the seed varieties are developed for conventional farming. So you do the conversion but the germ plasma is not appropriate. That’s changing because there are some seed companies in the United States that are trying to produce organic seeds that are adapted. But in the beginning I think that the genetic base was the wrong one for organic agriculture.
Whereas in the peasant agriculture you have thousands of varieties that reached genetic diversity that provided the genetic base for the agricultural system. There has been a need to preserve it. But you need to preserve it in situ, not ex situ, not stick it in some refrigerator like most of the national plant breeders do, but in situ with farmer management.
One of the ways that is done is through seed fairs for farmers. Most seed fairs are organized by NGOs, local governments and farmers’ organizations. They take place in a church or in a school or wherever farmers can come and exchange the seeds between themselves. Often what happens is that farmers are exposed for the first time to the richness of the genetic diversity of the region. A farmer may know what seeds his or her neighbors have and they’re familiar with the genetic richness in their immediate area but are not familiar with the seed diversity at the regional level. So there’s a huge exchange of seeds.
At the same time a lot of NGOs take advantage of organizing meetings about the geopolitics of germ plasma and they talk about biopiracy and about biotechnology so farmers become aware of these issues. This mechanism provides an opportunity for farmers to exchange germ plasma and to enrich the genetic diversity of their communities. The biggest seed fair happens in south Brazil in a place called Anchieta, which is a little town in the west part of south Brazil. I went there. Ten thousand farmers were there. In total they brought more than a hundred thousand pounds of seeds to exchange; that happened regionally.
AM: Are seed fairs in and of itself an effective strategy to prevent biopiracy or are there other strategies?
Miguel: The seed fair is done basically to raise awareness about the issues of biopiracy. Farmers protect that germ plasma in their communities. So for example in the south of Chile on the Island of Chile, farmers have the right to inspect what people take off the island in their suitcases. If they catch you taking away some of the local, traditional germ plasma, then you have to leave it or pay for it. There are other regions where that is going on. Also increasingly, a lot of little communities or municipalities are declaring themselves free of GMOs and free of agrochemicals. In some cases the mayor has the capacity to declare the area GMO free. This is happening all over the place. There is a state in the south of Brazil, Parana, that is the only GMO free state Latin America, which came about by decree of the governor. The only country that is free of GMOs in all of Latin America is Venezuela.
The Island of Chile, which is the center of origin of potato, is about to declare itself GMO free. The only way to prevent contamination is by creating a huge area that is GMO free. And what is interesting is that these areas of GMO free agriculture are going to become the sanctuaries of genetic diversity that are going to be needed to be reintroduced into areas that were contaminated.
AM: There are many known problems with genetic engineering. In addition you point out that genetic modification diminishes the adaptability of a seed.
Miguel: What happens with the GMO contamination, for example, of the corn in Mexico, which is the center of origin for maize, is that there’s a metabolic cost. When there’s pollution with GMO pollen, the local variety has to express that characteristic; it becomes programmed. There’s a genetic order that comes with that pollen. When the plant express that characteristic, let’s say BT resistant or resistance to herbicide or whatever, then that expression happens at the expense of something that is important for farmers such as drought resistance or storage quality or whatever. As a result the sustainability of their system breaks down because now the plants are expressing a characteristic that peasant farmers are not interested in, but it occurs at the expense of a characteristic that is important and vital for them. That kind of genetic pollution alters the genetic integrity of the local varieties and farmers lose the characteristics that they bred the varieties for. So it’s very important for the future of humankind to create the sanctuaries of GMO free areas.
