Mexican farmers bring balance back to their environment

A return to traditional methods helps community increase its yields

(Meredith Barges photo for UUSC)
Adrián Peréz, left, president of the Vicente Guerrero group, and Robert Saper, Witness for Peace International Team Member in Mexico, examine an agave plant, which has over a hundred known uses.

Meredith Barges, a resident of Boston, is Editor/Writer for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an international human-rights agency in Cambridge, Mass. She recently returned from a visit to Mexico as part of a 12-person delegation organized by the UUSC's JustJourneys Program. The delegation met with garment workers, economic migrants, small farmers, and others in order to assess how globalization and free trade agreements are affecting the lives of ordinary people.

By Meredith Barges

Our JustJourney delegation had the pleasure of spending a few days with the farming community in the town of Vicente Guerrero and members of El Proyecto de Desarrollo Rural Integral Vicente Guerrero, A.C., a rural development group, in Mexico's Tlaxcala state, where we learned about sustainable agriculture in the context of rural Mexico.

Here was a farming community that found itself in the 1970s unable to provide for its own food needs. Local residents were forced to work outside of the community in order to earn enough money just to put food on the table. This became a wake-up call for community organizers to get a handle on their food production and food sovereignty (as it's called in development circles).

They reached out internationally to find new approaches and held learning exchanges with farmers in Central America. They encouraged residents to plant backyard gardens and raise livestock -- and, through the Campesino a Campesino (Peasant to Peasant) movement, they introduced new farming methods that increased their productivity from 600 kilos per hectare to 8,000-14,000 kilos per hectare. Now they are able to sell excess foods!

Interestingly, the path toward sustainability led the people of Tlaxcala to organic farming long before it was hip to shop at Whole Foods or demand that your fruits and veggies don't arrive at your dinner table covered in harmful pesticides. They use a variety of innovative techniques to create a life-giving equilibrium among animals, soil, and water in their milpas (fields). Many of their techniques come from traditional farming methods used in this region for centuries.

From the Vicente Guerrero group, we learned about the Green Revolution of the 1940s-1960s, which increased world food production with the advent of new farming technologies, including the use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Part of the Green Revolution was creating high-yield, single-crop fields that could produce tons upon tons of food items such as corn, wheat, or fruit. But the Green Revolution -- for whatever reasons -- had failed the farmers and community of Vicente Guerrero.

It doesn't take an entomologist or an etymologist to see all of the "-cides" that helped to boost productivity during the Green Revolution. In effect, the Green Revolution was successful in producing foods at the expense of biodiversity and the ecosystem, which we now know our living planet needs in order to thrive.

As Pánfilo Hernández, a coordinator for the Vicente Guerrero group explained, “The Green Revolution was about extermination and creating inequality in the system. We need to bring back how ecological systems were used before by our ancestors in order to bring the environment back to balance.”

Thinking about the impact of modern, large-scale insecticide use brought to my mind Silent Spring, the book by Rachel Carson, which explores what happens in the environment when you kill off all of the insects... You kill off all of the birds and every other living things that depend on insects and small organisms for life, too.

Of course, recognizing the harm and the waste of such an approach, the Vicente Guerrero farmers, instead, have planted fruit trees along their crop fields in order to give living animals (insects included) something else to eat besides just valuable cash crops. These are called “living fences.” One year, when their fields were inundated with a would-be plague of grasshoppers, they put chicken coops in their fields so that the chickens could eat the grasshoppers and then they could eat the chickens. “The goal,” as Hernández put it, “is always to integrate and manage the equilibrium.”

An old-fashioned approach one might say, but a thoroughly sane approach in my view. Whatever the sustainable agriculture movement heralds -- as an alternative to the Green Revolution or to the coming bio-tech or GMO (genetically modified organism) movement -- it reminds us of the sacredness of the full circle of creation and the possibility that, if we try, we can all live in harmony together.

For more information about UUSC JustJourneys, visit the UUSC website at http://www.uusc.org/justjourneys/index.html. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.