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Abstract

The Anthropocene is a site of domination and resistance for those opposed to the corporatised food regime. The peasant farmers’ movement, La Vía Campesina, uses pedagogical techniques based on Freirian horizontal communication methodology to contest the structural and ideological elements of this regime. This article analyses these techniques, which include farmer-to-farmer learning (campesino-a-campesino) and dialogue among different knowledges and ways of knowing (diàlogo de saberes). Drawing on case studies of Brazil and Chile, the author analyses how peasant farmer organisations engage in horizontal exchange and learning processes to collectively build a shared vision of agroecology, present alternative framings of food scarcity, and challenge the modes of power that operate in the arena of food politics. She explores how movement members apply social process methodology to link the food sovereignty framework with indigenous knowledge, gender equity and post-colonial theory and in doing so demonstrates how these participatory processes generate critical consciousness of the social and environmental unsustainability of the global food system. This mobilises peasant farmers to contest the power structures that shape their food environments, and also to focus on social and economic justice within their communities.

Keywords

Food Sovereignty agroecology La Vía Campesina Freire food systems education Latin America

Introduction

The world’s food systems are reaching a critical juncture, bringing urgency to the call for transitions to more sustainable and equitable agricultural practices. The dominant model of export-oriented, cash agriculture that drives profits and supports cheap, largely urban-based labour has contributed to a devastating paradox (Patel and Moore, 2017). Although world hunger is on the rise, growing from 777 million undernourished in 2015 to 815 million in 2016 (Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 2017), a surfeit of cheap, calorific food is anticipated to contribute to forecasts of 3.28 billion overweight and obese individuals, globally, by 2030 (Kelly et al., 2008). Food systems account for nearly one-third of greenhouse gas emissions while agricultural production, including indirect impacts of land-use change, contributes 80 to 86 per cent of total food system emissions (Vermeulen et al., 2012). The search for biomass alternatives to replace fossil-fuels drives some of these land-use changes that, in turn, take more land out of agricultural production and place further stress on biodiversity. Cheap food is not so cheap when these costs are taken into account (Patel and Moore, 2017; Rundgren, 2016).

The transnational peoples’ movement La Vía Campesina (the peasant way), which claims to represent 200 million small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, migrant workers and landless peasants, promotes food sovereignty as an alternative to industrial agriculture. Central to this political project is ‘agroecology’, which represents a very different ‘value system’ (Meek, 2014: 48). Defined as ‘a way of redesigning food systems, from the farm to the table, with a goal of achieving ecological, economic, and social sustainability’ (Gliessman, 2016: 187), agroecology is now widely cited by a growing number of international agricultural experts to be a viable solution to a conventional production model that is resource-intensive and environmentally destructive (Valenzuela, 2016). It is described by advocates as more than a technical program; rather, it is part of a larger movement toward an ‘emancipatory rural politics’ (Scoones et al., 2017).

The role of learning in engineering this shift requires an understanding of contemporary agricultural values and practices as well as barriers to change that include historic land use and family traditions. This article presents an overview of how member organisations of La Vía Campesina in two Latin American countries, Brazil and Chile, are using the concept of agroecology and Freirean political philosophies of education to influence agrarian practices in ways that incorporate understandings of landscape histories, public policies, and cultural traditions.

In Latin America the academic ‘re-emergence’ of agroecology occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s as anthropology, ethno-ecology, rural sociology, development studies and ecological economics supplemented a field dominated by agronomy and ecology (Altieri and Nicholls, 2017). In the 1990s, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with the social and environmental impacts of the Green Revolution promoted agroecology as a participatory approach to the conventional model of agricultural extension, which was based on disseminating agricultural research from technical experts in a top-down manner (Altieri, 2002). These NGOs, led by initiatives including the Centre for Education and Technology in Chile and Centres for Family Agriculture and Agroecology in Brazil, trained hundreds of NGO technicians and farmer-promoters. The Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development and the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology developed research programs and progressed the agroecology agenda in the 1990s producing many world leaders in the discipline. At this time, small-scale farmers were mobilising against the formation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and a liberalised trade regime that would further marginalise them.¹ These farmers, many of whom were active in the mobilisation of La Vía Campesina in 1993, quickly recognised the agroecological approach as an important element of resistance against industrial agriculture and neo-liberal policies. This contributed to agroecology’s adoption as a ‘strategic ideological element’ for agrarian social movements (Altieri and Nicholls, 2017: 235).

The Brazilian and Chilean cases presented here provide different perspectives on how agroecology is taught and operationalised. Agroecological knowledge is transmitted through ‘transdisciplinary, participatory, and change-oriented research and action’ (Gliessman, 2015) in the Institutes for Agroecology in Latin America (IALA), conducted in Brazil by the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and, more recently, in Chile by the National Association of Indigenous and Rural Women (ANAMURI). In these Schools, resistive pedagogical and communication models are applied with the aim of developing students as technically proficient, politicised individuals who can help their communities make the shift to ecological farming. Agroecology is a form of agricultural extension or ‘relational mechanism’ that educates farmers through the dissemination of new knowledge. In comparison to other forms of extension, however, students learn how landscapes are produced by public policies, embodying ‘histories’ that influence modern land use. They are also taught to recognise the ‘cognitive mechanisms’ that shape their and their family’s understandings of options and possibilities regarding land management and food production (Meek, 2016: 287). As David Meek (2016) tells us, education is central to negotiating the cultural politics of any shift from the dominant system but changes in values are ‘inextricable from larger processes of political environmental change’ (Meek, 2016: 287). The food regime concept is a useful lens for examining these processes, which shape the geo-politics and power relations in the food system.

Recognising that researcher positionality has influence on the research process, I explicitly declare myself as an ‘outsider’ to the cultures being studied (Hammersley, 1993; Herod, 1999). Undoubtedly my personal world-view is coloured by my values, race, and gender (Sikes, 1996), coupled with more subjective elements, such as my history and experience (Chiseri-Strater, 1996). This reflexivity leads me to self-assess my location in relation to the subject, the participants and the research process, including the design and interpretation of my findings (Greenbank, 2003; Savin-Bader and Howell Major, 2013).

My mixed method approach is pragmatic, determined by my previous doctoral research on Latin and Iberian agrarian movements (Mann, 2014); my professional background as a educator in secondary schools in my early career, and now university; and my personal interest in pedagogies for empowerment. I am keenly aware of the nature of my position as an educated Australian woman of European descent, but as I have discovered in my research in countries including Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba, this does not necessarily predispose me to a colonial or settler perspective; quite the contrary. My primary aim is that my research is of value to those who make it possible – the agrarian communities who promote alternative, socially just ways of producing and providing food as the means to achieving buen vivar, or good living.

A brief overview of food regimes

Food regime theory provides a ‘comparative-historical lens on the political and ecological relations of modern capitalism writ large’ (McMichael, 2009: 142). A food regime is defined as a ‘rule-governed structure of the production and consumption of food on a world scale’ (Friedmann 1993 in McMichael, 2009). The first food regime (1870–1930) was based on colonial tropical imports including grains and livestock produced in settler colonies through monocultural agriculture, a simplification that has reached crisis point with biodiverse and sustainable agriculture increasingly under threat. In the second food regime (1950–1970s), surplus flows of food were sent to postcolonial states as food aid, driving the development model, a power structure that creates needs and then proposes to satisfy those needs – a ‘subtle strategy’ that enables interventions by nation-states, NGOs and multinational corporations under the guise of benevolence (Giraldo and Rosset, 2017; see also Escobar, 2011). Green Revolution technologies accelerated yields while transnational linkages between national farm sectors grew into global supply chains and created a new international division of labour in agriculture. Commodity markets grew and, through financial speculation, contributed to food price hikes such as those experienced in 2007, 2008 and 2011. Overproduction is manifested in exported surpluses that propel the expansion of agribusiness transnationals (Guthman, 2011; Weis, 2007). The third food regime (late 1980s on) is characterised by McMichael (2008) as a deepening and expansion of the existing regime to emerging economies such as China and Brazil, accompanied by a power shift to the retail sector via a ‘supermarket revolution’, the emergence of the global food/fuel complex and the end of the liberalised trade regime with the decline of the influence of the WTO.

The third or corporate food regime captures the contradictions between a ‘‘‘world agriculture” (food from nowhere) and a place-based form of agro-ecology (food from somewhere)’ (McMichael, 2009: 147). Agroecology, which integrates ecological principles into agricultural systems (Gliessman, 2015, 2016), is both ‘an objective and a strategy…not only a means of production but also a praxis of change: the building of autonomy from the production systems of the hegemonic model’ (La Vìa Campesina, 2017b: 36). As such, for the social movements campaigning for food sovereignty,

…[it is] a form of resistance and of deconstruction of dependence on commercial seeds, pesticides and fertilisers which are becoming increasingly expensive, and of the possibility of building and salvaging knowledge which is part of a sustainable relationship between humans and nature, based on ancestral knowledge, culture and territorial diversity (La Vìa Campesina, 2017b: 36).

In Latin America, specifically, landscapes such as the Cerrado, Amazon and Pampa have been reshaped by agribusiness in a ‘brutal transformation’ that began with sugar plantations under slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries and is now seen in the ‘endless fields’ of soya beans, maize and intensive livestock farms (Rundgren, 2016: 104). As these conditions extend across farming regions and the entire food chain, their costs are externalised and manifested in climate change, loss of biodiversity and the poisoning of water and soil. Accordingly, ‘the trajectory of the corporate [third] food regime is constituted through resistances: both protective (e.g. environmentalism) and proactive, where ‘food sovereignty’ posits an alternative global moral economy’² (McMichael, 2005: 286).

Agroecology as science, ideology and practice

Agroecological approaches to food production include the conservation and sustainable use of seeds and natural inputs as a means to improve resilience to climate change, natural disasters and economic shocks. Food sovereignty advocates argue that agroecology cools the planet, nourishes the majority of the world’s population, protects the environment and builds resilient food production systems. Further, it strengthens communities by valuing and applying traditional knowledge, practices and innovation of farmers. It is worth noting that ‘peasants persist because peasant economies are sustained and adapted over time as a set of alternative sociospatial practices’ where local relationships of exchange and collectively organised practices co-exist with capitalist forms of agriculture and trade (Cid Aguayo and Latta, 2015: 402). In reports by the FAO (2015) and independent scientific studies including the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (2009; see also Valenzuela, 2016) agroecology is recognised as a possible alternative to Green Revolution technologies and as a basis for achieving food sovereignty and protecting farmers’ rights, including the rights of crop producers, livestock keepers and pastoralists, fisherfolk and local and indigenous communities to natural resources such as land, water, forest and genetic resources. However the social movements are wary that institutions including the FAO may dismiss the ‘transformative potential’ of agroecology and instead focus on it as ‘a way of making industrial agriculture less unsustainable’ (Giraldo and Rosset, 2017: 2). For La Vìa Campesina, agroecology is a ‘multidimensional space of social processes, sharing, culture, and art’ that should be led by farmers and their families. In these processes there is no place for biotechnological solutions as ‘agroecology is incompatible with genetic engineering, there can be no agroecology with agrochemicals or with the transnational agribusiness corporations’ (La Vìa Campesina, 2017a). This ‘rejection’ of biotechnology embodies how agroecology

…must challenge the ideological system that protects the corporate food regime and it must take issue with the concentration of power and the unequal distribution of wealth that lie at the heart of the way the food system operates (Gliessman, 2015: 310).

Despite this common agenda, it is important to note that agroecology is understood by different groups in different ways. Indigenous movements consider agroecology as aligning with traditional farming systems based on cosmic calendars that dictate planting dates, for example, while peasant family farmers adopt agroecological techniques to manage low-cost, subsistence production that relies on the local resources (Toldeo, 2000 in Meek, 2014; van der Ploeg, 2012). Rural proletarian movements apply specific methodological tools including diàlogo de saberes, a Freirean form of farmer-to-farmer (campesino-a-campesino) knowledge exchange based on ‘horizontal dialogue between peers who have different knowledges and cosmovisions’ (Martìnez-Torres and Rosset, 2014: 4). Within La Vìa Campesina, agroecological knowledge is ‘shared horizontally across transnational circuits’ in a manner ‘directly contrary to the hierarchical concentration of knowledge production by agro-business’ (Cid Aguayo and Latta, 2015: 404). It is presented as a proposal to 'regenerate agroecosystems, including plant, animal and soil biodiversity, as well as indigenous cultures with their diverse ways of producing in harmony with Mother Earth' (La Vìa Campesina, 2017a)

The Indigenous perspective has provided an important unifying lens for the global movement. Food sovereignty recognises that Indigenous peoples worldwide have suffered from European colonisation and the removal or alteration of traditional lands that produced a variety of traditional foods. Environmental degradation, neoliberal trade agendas, lack of access to land, the breakdown of tribal social structures and socio-economic marginalisation are among the barriers to healthy and culturally adapted Indigenous foods. Aboriginal people have been subjected to a ‘de-culturing from within [where] State technologies of order were designed to smash the Indigenous systems of food production, consumption, celebration and identity, to replace them with the civilising forces of modernity’ (Grey and Patel, 2014: 7). The discourse of food sovereignty privileges Indigenous views, knowledge and practices in biodiversity conservation and recognises the ‘remarkable overlap between Indigenous territories and the world’s remaining areas of highest biodiversity’ (Toledo, 2011). Aboriginal conceptions of food sovereignty emphasise food as sacred, reflect deep connections/kinship with the environment and rely on intergenerational transmission of food-related knowledge. Mistìca, a shared ritual performance of the connection among the peasant, seeds, soil and water performed at La Vía Campesina meetings, is a way of creating ‘a sense of cohesiveness among people from such diverse and different cultures who do not speak common languages’ (Martinez Torres and Rosset, 2010: 164). It is a vital means of communication that fosters the development and maintenance of a common identity between members of the wider food sovereignty movement.

As a ‘socially activating’ form of agriculture (Warner, 2008) women’s knowledge, values, vision and leadership are central. La Vía Campesina emphasises that food sovereignty is ‘only possible with a fundamental transformation of unequal gender relations within and beyond movements themselves’ (Desmarais and Nicholson, 2013: 6). The movement’s ‘World Campaign to End Violence Against Women’ identifies neoliberalism with patriarchy, linking local struggles against everyday forms of dominance with the capitalist market, stating ‘it is necessary to stop the violence against women that invades their bodies, subjectivities and social, cultural and symbolic goods’ (La Vía Campesina, 2012). It is recognised that traditional forms of tenure and land use are also steeped in patriarchy. In many Latin American countries men hold tenure and the decision-making power in most rural households, and therefore female farmers face specific obstacles. Accordingly, the struggle for food sovereignty for poor indigenous women in Chile, for example, represents more than opposition to the corporate food regime. Agroecology for these women is a resistive epistemology that ‘resumes the indigenous, black, feminist, anticolonial and any-imperialism struggle of more than 500 years…[agroecology] defends the great popular diversity of humanity, biodiversity as the organising principle of Mother Earth and the plurality of knowledge’ (ANAMURI member cited in Garrido, 2016). At the Second International Conference of La Vía Campesina in 1996, a Women’s Commission was created with the aim of increasing the participation and representation of women in meetings. It has ensured parity in decision-making and monitored the use of gender-neutral language while promoting policies to end physical and sexual violence against women and provide them with improved access to land, credit, markets, information and administrative rights.

Agroecology as critical food systems education

As an ideology opposed to the expansion of capital, oppressing patriarchies and hierarchically organised food systems, agroecological knowledge must be disseminated in a horizontal and experiential manner, where spaces for the learning process are opened up, for ‘if the practice is imposed and didactic, instead of endogenous and participative, it contradicts the democratising potential that this social-economic and ecological approach has…converting [it] into another form [of] epistemological imperialism’ (Chohan, 2017). The education of teachers in the IALA is not limited to curriculum development but ‘speaks from critical perspective to the way knowledge is produced in society and how this process can contribute to either merely reproducing relations of power or to the creation of new knowledge and to the transformation of society’ (del Pilar O'Cadiz et. al, 1998: 89)

This methodology is based on the teachings of Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire, leader of the Movement for Popular Culture from 1960s and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970). Freire established the ‘literacy circles’ program with sugar cane workers in Pernambuco, North Eastern Brazil, teaching workers to read and write, an initiative that spread across the country. Following exile in the 1964 military coup he directed programs in Chile 1965–1969, returning to Brazil under the Workers’ Party government, which represented a rural and urban working class constituency. In his brief tenure as Education Minister of Brazil, Freire worked with local communities to establish the Popular Public Schools ‘built on participative planning and delivery’ with support from civil society groups including NGOs and social movements (O’Cadiz et al., 1994: 209).

Aiming to revolutionise educational practices, Freire sought to eliminate hierarchy in the classroom by bringing students in as equal participants in the learning process and insisting that the curriculum must reflect and respond to the lived experience of learners to enable them to develop ‘an awareness of the dialectical relationship of local and global contexts with an orientation towards action’ (Bolin, 2017: 757). Linking learning to cultural politics and class struggle, Freire encouraged students to challenge the dominant ideology through critical engagement or ‘conscientization’ (Freire, 1998) – a three-stage project involving investigation, thematisation, and problematisation of the practical needs and daily concerns of peasant farmers. This serves, ideally, to develop ‘understanding of the interrelation of local and global issues’ (Bolin, 2017: 758). Using this cyclical process to create a common vocabulary and shared understanding, students are encouraged to rethink meaning-making systems and engage in an informed way with issues identified in and by the community. This directly contradicts what Freire termed the top-down, teacher-as-expert, ‘banking approach’ to education that feeds knowledge down from experts to the rural poor and serves to integrate them into the structure of oppression, rather than ‘transform that structure so they can become “beings for themselves”’ (Freire, 1970: 47). This critical pedagogy focuses on how education is connected to broader social change, and how schooling itself can serve as an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser, 1970). Accordingly, students need tools to reflect on the realities of knowledge production, culture, racialisation and gender identities (Tarlau, 2014), and recognise that the food system is an ‘ecological, social and economic system and needs to be viewed as such in all its complexity’ (Rundgren, 2016: 106).

The Freirean approach helps ‘student develop a consciousness of freedom, recognise authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice and democracy’ (Giroux, 2010: 1). It addresses the need to embrace transdisciplinary strategies that ‘incorporate non-academic ways of knowing into knowledge generation activities, acknowledging that certain research problems or objectives require engagement beyond narrowly defined expert knowledge’ (Valley et al., 2017: 6). Critics of narrowly defined, sectorial approaches to food systems education note that the underlying capitalist ideology of the corporate food regime – defined in terms of capital accumulation and the logic of the marketplace – is rarely challenged in universities or schools (McLaren 2003 cited in Bolin, 2017; Holt-Giménez, 2017; Meek and Tarlau, 2016; Valley et al., 2017). Any ‘signature pedagogy for sustainable food systems education’ (Valley et al., 2017) should engage with issues of politics and power, and incorporate collective action, systems thinking and experiential learning.

Institutes for Agroecology in Latin America

The social movements that comprise La Vìa Campesina recognise the importance of creating spaces and ‘learning networks’ (McMichael, 2008) that focus on the pedagogical aspects of organising that are critical to their emergence and maintenance (Tarlau, 2014). Their tools include the IALA, ‘agro-ecological training spaces that democratise debate, knowledge, science and technology… where training is oriented towards critical thinking and, at the same time, seek to equip young people with practical tools to build food sovereignty’ (Garrido, 2016). The Schools were originally established by the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organisations in reaction to dominant systems of education in contemporary universities that produce graduates with technical skills that serve the needs of the corporate food regime:

Unfortunately, the professionals who are being trained today in all the universities are professionals for the system, including the agronomy engineers…in the past an agronomist was more complete, his practice was together with the peasantry. Today, their practices revolve around large corporations and they are all thinking about how are they going to make money without having any consideration or recognition of the value of the Earth, the knowledge of the men and women peasants, the peasant practices for doing agriculture that are amenable to the earth and the environment… we say no to the technological practices of today that are destructive and devastating towards the earth and the ecosystems. (Rodríguez cited in Paget-Clarke, 2014)

The first National School was set up in Paraná state, municipality of Lapa, Brazil in 2005, followed by Venezuela in 2006, Paraguay in 2008, the Amazon in 2009, Chile in 2014 and Colombia in 2016. Argentina, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have also established IALA, and a new proposal for a school in Haiti has been put forward (Chohan, 2017). In the Schools, agroecological knowledge is grounded in social and environmental justice concerns to create a new ethics where peasant praxis and collective action are valourised. Staff are politically active, and their own organising, collective bargaining, and representation encouraged. Teaching explicitly promotes ‘epistemological resistance against agro-business dominance’ (Chohan, 2017). While the Schools are united in their aims to integrate youth into an alternative food systems paradigm that support small-scale peasant farming and collective agriculture practices, differences are based on the needs specific to each country and region.

Brazil – Federal Institute of Pará-Rural Campus of Maraba and MST

An emerging economy with unrivalled rates of inequality, Brazil has one of the highest concentrations of property ownership in the world, stemming from colonial land grants and historical laws of tenure, and exacerbated by agro-industrial policies and development projects. The wealthiest 10 per cent of the population possesses 46 per cent of the nation’s income while 50 per cent collectively own 13 per cent. One per cent of landowners control 45 per cent of farmland, a legacy of the large land grants to privileged Portuguese families and the institutions of slavery in the colonial era (Carter, 2015). Those who live in the countryside are the most affected by the incursion of international capital. The MST emerged in the 1980s via religious networks, rural trade unions and civil society activism. Peasant farmers, the urban poor and Indigenous members continue to resist the occupation of large tracts of land for monocultures such as the ‘republic of soya’ (Fernandes, 2015). On these sites, the persecution and criminalisation of protestors and human rights defenders is common. Between 1985 and 2006, nearly 1,500 land reform activists and peasant farmers, including children, were killed in rural conflicts in Brazil (Pastoral Commission of the Earth, n.d.).

In the mid-1990s, MST started targeting large global corporations to protest their growing influence in the countryside, recognising the green deserts of monoculture as a new set of obstacles to constitutionally endorsed land reform. Since the 1980s, 350,000 landless families have secured land rights through occupations of unproductive estates (Meek and Tarlau, 2016: 246). In the Pontal do Paranapanema region of São Paulo State, for example, hundreds of landless families wait patiently to be settled on a parcel of land. Surrounded by a green desert of sugar cane, they shelter in roadside encampments, described as ‘rural favelas’ by an unsympathetic media. The framing of members of MST as fundamentalists, terrorists and a dangerous menace is a response to the growing role of the movement as a leading critic of neoliberal policies and its role as a voice for the rural and urban marginalised.

In the 1980s, MST observed that the occupation of land would need to be supported by a parallel occupation of the school system to counter these negative framings and the government’s increasingly narrow focus on urban priorities. Additionally, education outcomes across the country reflected ‘serious problems’ in terms of access, consistency and quality; in the 1990s, just under 50 per cent of Brazilians had two years of schooling, considered the minimum for functional literacy (O’Cadiz, et al., 1998: 47). A thriving private sector funds the education of middle-class children while poor and working class families endured ‘a demoralising public schooling or total exclusion’ (cited in O’Cadiz et al., 1998: 48). Freire’s introduction of the Popular Public Schooling or the ‘education of the people’ transformed the original model of public education to one that engages marginalised groups in critical awareness and action. In rural areas, Education of the Countryside, based on Catholic liberation theology (see Boff, 1994) and Frieirean-based study groups, was developed to advance MST’s political struggle to obtain agricultural land and promote peasant agriculture as an oppositional territorial paradigm to agribusiness (Fernandes, 2015; Meek and Tarlau, 2016). It was the basis of the Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform in 1998, and a series of national guidelines in 2001 and 2008 before the creation of an Education of the Countryside office in the Ministry of Education in 2005 and a presidential decree of support in 2010.

The Federal Institute of Pará-Rural Campus of Maraba was established on an MST settlement in 2007, with the objective of educating a ‘critical citizenry that is capable of understanding the social, economic, and political contexts of their home community and its relations to the state’ (cited in Meek and Tarlau, 2016: 249). A vocational high school delivering agroecological extension training to settlement residents, the Federal Institute of Pará-Rural Campus of Maraba encourages cooperative initiatives, worker organising and solidarity economy approaches alongside agroecological land management practices. The curriculum is based on an ‘alternating pedagogy’ where students share their time between the campus and their own community, conducting place-based research to identify the sources of oppression, violence and dispossession that pre-date settlements. Interviewing farmers about their land management decisions, they engage in experiential learning that legitimises ordinary knowledges and lived experience while also connecting local struggles to the wider food sovereignty movement.

David Meek (2016) describes a final class project ‘Improving My Land’ that engages with the history of the production on the landscape, and especially family histories of land management, with the aim of redressing the mechanisms that have led to the dominance of cattle ranching over alternatives such as diversified crops. The project requires students to consider the social, political and economic impacts of development such as a road, and the existing technical practices of the family. A particular focus is on the rationale for changes in practice:

How have they maintained their life within that space? For example if your land was already cattle pasture, and … you got cattle because that made sense. With this understanding of the history of your landscape, and your family’s role in its transformation, you’ll be able to better describe your vision for that landscape. (cited in Meek, 2016: 286).

Another example is a seed saving bank project in response to concerns regarding transgenic seeds supplied by corporates in packages of inputs, including pesticide, herbicide and fertilizers. Identifying a lack of traditional seeds in their communities, students interrogated farmer reliance on agribusiness companies for a resource that has traditionally been the common property of communities. Gathering, planting, preserving and sharing local varieties among the communities, the students engaged in transformative pedagogy and practice, articulating that ‘seed sovereignty is about resisting the market control of common resources, breaking farmers’ reliance upon the agroindustrial system, and helping them regain their agency over the production, management, and preservation of traditional seed stocks’ (Meek and Tarlau, 2016: 252). As a generative theme, seed saving is also common to the Chilean case, where women are taking increasing leadership roles in alternative food movements and economies.

Chile - The Agroecological Institute for Rural Women and ANAMURI

In Chile, with the neoliberal ‘success story’ of the region based on relatively low fiscal debt coupled with political stability, poor, rural and indigenous women face particular challenges in explaining their positions and presenting mobilising rights frames. Critical of state-run organisations and lacking insider connections with mass media, they focus on rebuilding the capacity and linkages that comprised effective and influential peasant unions prior to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Since the emergence of the country from the dictatorship into democracy, Chilean elites have promoted the agro-export model as ‘an unquestionable success’ while small scale farmers are driven from the land by the pressure of ‘intermediaries’ such as supermarkets and the lack of alternative markets that supply a fair price for produce (Garrido, 2016). Employers exploit the poor information base available to peasants and take advantage of the lack of mobility of male and female farm workers who are left vulnerable to pesticide poisoning, unfair employment contracts and child labour. Seventy-five per cent of the owners of family farms are men (Sepulveda, 2009).

Central to this struggle is the umbrella organisation ANAMURI, which emerged in 1998 and today leads local campaigns for the rights of seasonal workers, international campaigns for the protection of biodiversity through seed-saving and draws on pan-Andean and international women’s networks including Indigenous movements, the World March of Women, the Peoples’ Coalition of Food Sovereignty and the Pesticide Action Network. Public initiatives include the planting of organic gardens, farmers’ markets, food-tastings and seed exchange fairs. These patterns of exchange may not always operate outside the formal economy, but they do ‘politicise consumption and reconstruct food exchange as a space of trust, solidarity, and proximity, against the grain of the industrial food complex and globalised circuits of capital accumulation’ (Cid Aguayo and Latta, 2015: 402), as well as serving as a practical measure to protect biodiversity. ANAMURI is the main driver of the network of seed curators or ‘healers’ (the curadoras de semillas) who protect and share a wide variety of seeds in communities. The healing communicates a sense of care, an agro-ecological response to the creation of transgenic ‘terminator’ seeds genetically modified to grow plants with sterile seeds. The networking activities of the curadoras challenge the sense of displacement felt by farmers who depend on the generative abilities of the seeds. They offer an alternative epistemological model to the homogenisation of practice and product witnessed in the corporate food regime. The linking of identities among gardens, kitchens and peasant farms foster ‘resurgence, transmitting the enjoined agencies of soil, climate, seeds, and peasant producers into place-based experiences of food’ (Cid Aguayo and Latta, 2015: 402).

A longstanding strategy of ANAMURI has been the promotion of female leadership through Sustainable Agriculture Internships that include workshops on nutrition, women’s rights and personal development. The National Schools were originally based on this internship model, whereby two weeks of face-to-face learning would be followed by three weeks in community, in three blocks. This curriculum was modified to better suit the needs of the targeted group, peasant women 20–50 years of age, which include family dynamics, caring responsibilities, and work commitments. The challenge for the Schools is to continue to adapt training modalities for the specific needs of rural women with diverse racial and cultural heritage.

The first Agroecological Institute for Rural Women is situated 180 km south of Santiago in the town of Auquinco, a Mapuche name that means ‘the sound of water’ (Jarroud, 2014). ANAMURI initiated IALA specifically oriented to women who are less inclined to participate in the coeducational Schools. One ANAMURI member accounts for this as a consequence of a system where women are both ‘destitute of land and robbed of education’ (Rodríguez cited in Paget-Clarke, 2014):

For the parents it is very important that their sons have a degree, they never think of the women…because it is the man who is going to get married and must have a profession in order to be able to support his family…they are not realising that today as many women as men support families. The man must support the family – that is the established view in this very strong capitalist and patriarchal system.

Further, the dominant education system serves as a ‘mechanism of expulsion’ from the land as there is ‘no school education that allows us to take pride in our knowledge or the work of our parents’. Children go to the city for secondary education where the central message is that ‘peasant production is neither important nor of good quality’ (ANAMURI member cited in Garrido, 2016).

The Mapuche, along with six other indigenous groups (the Aymara, Quechua and Licarantai in the north; the Coya and Diaguitas from Atacama; and the Kaweskar in the far south), comprise 35 per cent of ANAMURI’s membership. An Araucanian-speaking indigenous group from the south of Chile, the Mapuche situate their claims in the wider struggles of their people, as opposed to those of the middle-class urban women’s movement into which they never truly integrated. As ‘marginal recipients of rights’, indigenous women are reluctant to embrace feminism (Radcliffe, 2002). Aspects of the feminist agenda are foreign to their culture, do not fit with their concerns and are sometimes seen as bourgeois. The world-view of Mapuche culture, for instance, includes a complementarity rather than a separation from men (Richards, 2004). Claims for cultural recognition clash with the hegemonic socioeconomic and ideological goals that underlie Chile’s national development – goals privileged above women’s rights, indigenous rights and social equality. As far as the Chilean state has been concerned, indigenous women are subsumed within other categories – as peasants, women or ‘ethnic subjects’. Indigenas are seen as particularly ‘nonmodern and non-national’, and are not seen as legitimate claimants of rights. Instead their needs have traditionally been largely incorporated into ‘mestizo development and masculinist political models’ (Radcliffe, 2002: 154). In this context, Schools play an important role in strengthening Indigenous identity as well as countering patriarchy and capitalism.

Conclusion

The industrial food regime is fundamentally undemocratic and is actively contributing to the global hunger, poverty and malnutrition of nearly a billion people, 70 per cent of whom are women and children (Zeigler et al., 2014). The current model not only impedes the goal of reaching ‘zero hunger’ (FAO, 2017) but impinges on ecosystem survival. Agroecology is deservedly gaining attention as a viable response to this crisis. Engaging youth and rural citizens in alternative, collective agricultural practices through a critical food systems education is one way in which social movements such as La Vìa Campesina aim to retain agroecology as a politically mobilising concept rather than ‘a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture’ (Giraldo and Rosset, 2017: 1).

The cases of IALA in Brazil and Chile presented in this article provide examples of the application of Freirean-based techniques and models of education as pathways to mobilisation against the dominant, market-driven paradigm of industrial agriculture. Embodying an ‘ecological and social ethics’ (Altieri and Nicholls, 2017: 236), these methods share a tension with the vertical dissemination or top-down modes of operation witnessed in conventional, technical extension programs. By connecting theory to practice, and embedding problem-solving in the rural communities in which students live, the Schools link student investigations of local challenges to broader social change movements such as the struggle for food sovereignty. This makes learning a political act that interrogates issues of power, scale and history, recognises different cosmologies, and celebrates rather than elides difference.

The ongoing tension between the technically focused agricultural extension systems and the more socially activating approaches is just one element to consider in the role of learning in shifts in agricultural values and practices. A complex cultural politics underpins the shift to agroecological farming, which faces barriers including historic land use and family resistance (Meek, 2016). These tensions remind us that it is important to avoid conflating the individual with the collective in our analysis of any movement (Wolford, 2010). Just as ‘no shared cosmology or shared political program’ (Grey and Patel, 2014) can accommodate all interpretations of food sovereignty, a single curriculum cannot satisfy the unique needs of those seeking to challenge modernist notions of power and autonomy in the food system. Women in many countries, for example, face particular challenges as primary carers responsible for the dietary demands of their families. They are charged with creating and participating in ‘collectively managed, socially, economically and environmentally sustainable local and regional food systems based on agro-ecological principles capable of producing and offering diversified, safe and healthy dietary patterns’ (Valente, 2015: 779) in a corporate food regime where these needs are secondary to profit. Further, indigenous peoples have unique understandings of food and land as sacred, and carry sophisticated systems of knowledge and protocols that govern the relationships among people, groups and their environments. It is only through inclusion of these multiple identities, conflicting needs and complex ontologies that the common goal of education as resistance, and persistence, against the corporate food regime can be achieved on any scale.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Alana Mann is Chair of the Department of Media and Communications within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a Key Researcher in the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the engagement of citizens and non-state actors in activism and policy debates to inform the creation of just and sustainable food systems.

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Education for food sovereignty as transformative ethical practice

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

A brief overview of food regimes

Agroecology as science, ideology and practice

Agroecology as critical food systems education

Institutes for Agroecology in Latin America

Brazil – Federal Institute of Pará-Rural Campus of Maraba and MST

Chile - The Agroecological Institute for Rural Women and ANAMURI

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References