Food Security Archive

Eagle and condor meet in visionary gathering of souls

Tracy Barnett

Published: November 26, 2010Posted in: Climate Change, Ecovillages, Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Indigenous rights, Mexico, Organic agriculture, Permaculture, Recycling, Reforestation, Spiritual, Watershed protection, WhyTags: Alberto Ruz Buenfil, Caravana Arcoiris, Consejo de Visiones, environment, Latin America, Mexico, Rainbow Caravan for Peace, Rainbow Warriors, spirituality, Vision Council

Eagle and condor meet in visionary gathering of souls

By Tracy L. Barnett

CHALMITA, Mexico State, Mexico – Long before the sun appears over the towering white cliffs all around us, this temporary village comes to life. The guardians of the ceremonial fire are stoking the flames for the temezcal; the kitchen crew is chopping and peeling and stirring; smoke is rising from the women’s tipi. Suddenly the resonant call of the conch rings out over the valley, calling us to the salutation of the sun, and the cry of an eagle pierces the air like a blessing.

We are gathered in this enchanted valley for the Call of the Eagle, the tenth intercontinental gathering of a group of dreamers and doers who are quietly changing the world from the inside out: the Consejo de Visiones – Guardianes de la Tierra (Vision Council – Guardians of the Earth).

Some 500 visitors from as far as Australia and as near as neighboring Chalmita – filmmakers and farmers, psychologists and shamans, artists and teachers, spiky-haired punks and lyrical poets – are learning to live together under the blue skies and bright stars of an itinerant ecovillage conceived more than a decade ago under the banner of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace and the Mexican Bioregional Movement. By the end of the week, this event will have touched the lives of more than 1,000.

This tenth gathering is a very special event for many reasons, chief among them that it is seen as the fulfillment of an Inca prophecy. When the Eagle and the Condor fly together, according to the prophecy, this will signal the dawn of a new era – the Eagle representing the North, and the Condor representing the South. Here in this sacred valley, lying in the shadow of an ancient pyramid amid the fertile Bosque de Agua, a high-energy group of visionaries, artists, and activists from North and South has come full circle.

Fourteen years ago, a now legendary group of them, led by among others Alberto Ruz Buenfil, otherwise known as the Subcoyote – cousin of Fidel Castro and son of the archaeologist who discovered Palenque’s fantastic hidden treasures – set off from this region for an epic journey that was to create the foundation for an intercontinental environmental, spiritual and social movement. After holding the first intercontinental congress of the Vision Council, they headed off in a bus painted like an ear of corn through the Zapatista territory of Chiapas, through the volcanic highlands of Central America and the tropical lowlands of Amazonia all the way to the tip of the continent in Patagonia. Using theater and the arts to plant seeds of hope, peace and sustainability in conflict zones, indigenous villages and crime-ridden barrios, they connected and nurtured social movements throughout the continent.

Their second international event, the Call of the Condor in 2002, brought some 1,300 activists and artists to the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu in Peru to begin the work of consolidating a vision for a transition to a new age. The third, Call of the Hummingbird, was held in Brazil in 2005 and drew more than 1,500.

Now, after 13 years, that caravan has finally come back to its roots, and the seeds they planted here in Mexico and across the continent have come full bloom in an astounding event that is awakening even the most cynical and reserved among us. Tears flow freely in the circles of dance, in the darkness of the temezcal, in the embraces of long-lost friends who have only just met.

But this is far from a feel-good encounter group. In fact, it’s far from anything I’ve experienced. These folks are facing the future with their eyes wide open, painfully aware of the resource and climate crises that loom on the horizon. It’s also not a hand-wringing session. No one here is waiting for government to resolve these pending crises, although government leaders are here to participate in the forums, workshops and demonstrations in areas encompassing ecology, health, spirituality, appropriate technology, and education among many others. Local schoolchildren, too, are brought in to participate in panels teaching self-reliance; local youth participate in forums organizing political and social action preparing for turbulent times in a post-petroleum world. Gaia University is here, sharing a revolutionary model for participatory education, granting diplomas, bachelor’s and master’s degrees while its students are engaged in planetary transformation.

One team is building an oven from mud and bricks, while another is building a solar clock; another group is learning about native herbal healing techniques, while still another is raising the ceremonial tipi that will be the headquarters of a powerful women’s healing circle, and another is discussing strategies for protecting this valley, a strategic but highly vulnerable center for water conservation. Another initiative is gathering momentum to support the Huicholes in a struggle to save their most sacred site, Cerro Quemado in Real de Catorce or Wirikuta, from a transnational mining operation.

Sacred rituals from the world’s great traditions mingle with dance and creations of art and song to raise the energy throughout the week to a level I never thought possible. Activities run from sunup to 3 a.m., but sleep seems superfluous.

The culmination of the event comes after an all-night vigil to greet the dawn; a spectacularly feathered and painted group of Aztec dancers await us around a blazing fire, and a mandala of dance and rhythm and song erupts.

As I sit down to try and put this phenomenon to words, I recall those of Coyote Alberto as we stood together on the last day.

“It’s all so perfect,” I told him. “My only regret is that it’s just impossible to put into words.”

He laughed knowingly – the author of several books about the caravan and its Rainbow Warriors, and now involved in a project to bring the lessons of the caravan home in Mexico City, he has struggled with this problem daily.

“Nobody believes you when you try to explain it,” he said. “They say, ‘You’re just writing what you want it to be.’ There’s no way to explain – you just have to live it.”

Never has a human being lived his words more authentically, more powerfully, more beautifully than the man at the heart of this vision turned reality. I can do no better than to end with some of those words, which Alberto shared with us during the closing ceremony.

“Two hundred years ago these lands were the scene of bloody battles; much blood was shed among our grandfathers and grandmothers to make a step forward in the process of evolution, of growth, toward our liberty as individuals, as a people, and as a nation…. A hundred years ago, again in these lands, much blood was spilled once again among our people, with the same goal, to be able to walk with a bit more liberty, a bit more strength.

“Today we are here together for the same cause, but together we are creating our own liberty, not just for Mexico but for the entire planet. Two hundred years ago we began the process of our independence. Today, what we have realized is that we are interdependent. Everyone for everyone… independence doesn’t exist. We are creating a planetary nation, interdependent.

“This day will be carried in the hearts of each of us as we take one more step on this road to liberty, this road toward dignity and justice. Everyone is responsible for everyone else. Our commitment is to this struggle, no longer with weapons of war but with weapons of dance and music, art and ceremony and ritual.

“If a hundred years ago a process of revolution began, today we also come to take a new step forward; we come to celebrate a re-evolution. We are standing here today, people from all over the planet, and each of us carries with us all our ancestors, all our traditions, all our grandparents, all those who struggled in the past to create a better future. Each one of you is the fruit of all the blood that was shed in these struggles, so that today we could be here present, celebrating, together in the same circle, with one heart and with one vision, on this day.

“Our grandparents spoke of prophecies. Today they are watching, and they see in us the ones they were waiting for.”

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Little finca, big dreams: Laura and eReciclaje

Tracy Barnett

Published: November 8, 2010Posted in: Colombia, Featured, Food Security, Organic agriculture, Permaculture, Recycling, Urban green space, WhyTags: Clean up the World, Colombia, eReciclaje, Latin America, Medellin, Organic agriculture, permaculture

Little finca, big dreams: Laura and eReciclaje

My other Pato contact was Laura Montoya, an elusive sprite of a woman who only sporadically answered e-mail and telephone. Laura had temporarily inherited the leadership of eReciclaje, an urban permaculture group established by her partner, Felipe Rrague, upon his departure to study in the States.

I finally caught up with her at a presentation at a local university, and she was worth the wait.

Laura Montoya of the peacock-feather earring, the disarming smile and the passionate rapid-fire defense of the Pachamama, is a one-woman Earth revolution in action. Over coffee, she sized me up and apparently decided I was worth her time, and she invited me to her home and the new headquarters of eReciclaje in the marginal barrio of Belen, up in the hills on the outskirts of the city.

The trip itself was almost as memorable as the actual visit. Starting from the classic Hotel Nutibara, whose elegant neoclassic lines are meant for others with far greater budgets than mine, I climbed into a bus destined for the outskirts. After nearly half an hour of traffic through the modern world of esthetic salons and shopping malls and residential neighborhoods we began to climb up and up into another world, one in which houses begin with brick and end with sheet metal and black plastic, where women still carry water in jugs and corn in tubs on their heads, where the smoke from cooking fires curls hangs in the air, where you or your neighbor may or may not have electricity or running water.

It was here that eReciclaje located its second project, the first one, an urban permaculture center in the rougher Barrio Triste neighborhood, having been undone by a devastating robbery.

Here, according to Laura, Felipe started over again, building terraces and irrigation ditches and working the land. Here is the regional headquarters for A Limpiar el Mundo or Clean Up The World, an international group working to organize mass cleanup projects, and here the plastic detritus of the neighborhood becomes eco-bricks of the sort David had demonstrated to me earlier.

But first, I had to find it. The neighborhood was a network of streets without names, and a misunderstanding led me to get off the bus in the wrong place. Finally, there she was, smiling, brilliant in her green hindu pants, big white sunglasses and peacock feather. We embraced, long-lost friends who had only met, and she led me up the hill to her “finca” next to the brick factory, where trucks rumbled up and down all day long, carrying away red bits of mountain in their cavernous beds.

Ironic, and someone poetic, that their little eco-brick workshop is right next to a brick factory of quite a different sort.

I thought of what David told me the other night in Sajonia as he tended his little fire. The Center for Ecological Arts is similarly situated in a truck-traffic zone near the cantera (quarry) and trucks rumble past all day long. Here, too, one can look out from this little mountain paradise and see the mountain across the valley being slowly eaten away.

“Some might see this as a negative thing, and sure, it’s sad to see the way they are altering the mountain – I wish they wouldn’t do it,” David had said, thoughtfully. “But this is exactly the mentality we are working to change – so it’s better that we are here, rather than isolating ourselves from it.”

Laura, it turned out, is not so different from me at 25, in love with an activist completely dedicated to his work, taking on the mantel of his cause as her own. Only hers had left the whole operation in her young hands. Suddenly I understood her reluctance to meet with me. She had been simply overwhelmed.

Still, her words flowed crisp and clear like the mountain stream outside the window. She spoke of dreams and visions, of tarot and shamans and sacred medicine, of greening and cleaning the world.

“Everything has a message, if we listen,” she told me.

I listened.

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Magui Balbuena: Campesina leader takes on Monsanto

Tracy Barnett

Published: September 28, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Organic agriculture, Paraguay, Transgenics, WhyTags: deforestation, glyphosate, GMOs, Monsanto, Paraguay, Roundup, soy, Transgenics

Magui Balbuena: Campesina leader takes on Monsanto

By Tracy L. Barnett

ASUNCION, Paraguay – I first saw Magui Balbuena at the Social Forum of the Americas – a small woman with a large presence, she was one of the masters of ceremonies at the event. The founder of CONAMURI, the National Council of Rural Workers and Indigenous Women, Magui has been a lifelong agitator for the rights of her country’s landless and impoverished farmers. Her work with campesino groups during the dictatorship landed her in prison and cost the lives of many friends and colleagues, and now she is a leading voice in the international campesino movement against the rapid spread of transgenic crops that has devastated the Paraguayan countryside.

“The campesino movement represents the best of our country,” a Paraguayan journalist friend had told me, and so I tracked down Magui’s phone number and gave her a call.

A friendly voice answered her phone immediately – it was gentle, not quite like the powerful voice I’d heard exhorting the crowds. I told her my mission and asked if she had a little time this week to meet with me.
“Can you come tomorrow morning between 7 and 8?” she asked. “That’s the only time I have available.”
I arrived at CONAMURI’s office at 7:30 and found a hub of activity. Magui was moving at the speed of light, organizing a workshop with youth leaders from all over the country, answering questions and fielding phone calls, one after another.

I looked around at the receiving room, barren of furniture except for two folding chairs. The walls spoke volumes, however, and I took a moment to read the collection of posters commemorating events and causes over the years, a gallery of hope and struggle.

“Soja para hoy; hambre para mañana (Soy for today; hunger for tomorrow),” read one. “Ya es tiempo para soberania alimentaria – con una agricultura reciproca con la Madre Tierra (It’s time for food sovereignty – with an agriculture reciprocal with the Mother Earth)!” read another.

Finally Magui lighted on the other folding chair and gave me a warm smile and her full attention. “We always start our workshops with a mistica,” she said. “Would you like to watch?”

“Claro,” I said. I had no idea what a mistica might be, but I was intrigued.

We chatted for a few moments as the group prepared; I shared with her my origins as the daughter and granddaughter of small farmers from the land of Monsanto, and a longtime opponent of genetically modified crops. She adopted me immediately as a friend and a compañera in the struggle.

Before our interview, though, she shared with me some devastating news. Her beloved 11-year-old grandson, Amaru, had been discovered to have a neurofibroma, a possibly life-threatening neurological condition, and she was waiting for news to know how severe the case was. Her daughter was coming soon to bring him so they could go together to the hospital. A roomful of animated teenagers awaited her presentation in the next room, and her phone kept ringing… but still she’d made time for me.

The workshop began at 8; I realized that she had meant, literally, that the time between 7 and 8 was all she had.
“We’re ready,” one of the compañeras called, and we headed out into the open courtyard. The youth gathered around a circle of youngsters, each one wearing a plastic poncho of a different color and a piece of paper bearing the name of what he or she represented: Earth, Air, Fire, Native Seeds… each with a bowl holding something that represented their chosen element. At the center, dressed in a black plastic poncho, was a peasant grim reaper, covered with the names of the campesinos’ worst nightmares: Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, biodiesel, transgenics, militarization.

Julia Franco, Magui’s comrade-in-arms for many years, led the group of youths in a procession. One by one, the poncho-garbed elements took their place in a procession that wove its way around the courtyard, singing a mournful dirge in Guaraní and forming a circle around Señor Monsanto. Quietly, without missing a beat in their mournful song, they each plucked a label from the Monsanto-branded reaper and gathered around. Señor Monsanto, like Oz’s wicked witch, slowly shrank to the ground and melted away.

After the mistica the youths took off their ponchos and took their seats as Magui took her place in front of the marker board and delivered a fiery analysis of the agro-exportation model that had deforested the countryside and impoverished the many while enriching the few. Her discourse flowed from Spanish to Guarani and back again, but her diagrams made her message clear: the transnational agro-exporting businesses are not their friends. She spoke from bitter experience; her community was one of those displaced by threatened violence from the soy growers in her area, who nearly killed her brother-in-law.

Magui’s biography, “Magui Balbuena: Semilla para una nueva siembra (Seed for a new harvest),” reads like a campesina version of I, Rigoberta Menchu. Told in her own words to Argentine writer Elisabeth Roig, she speaks of her early years, growing up in a family so poor she didn’t own shoes until the age of 13. She speaks of her father’s leadership in an early land occupation movement, risking his life to reclaim the use of communal lands that had been sold by the corrupt Stroessner dictatorship. She speaks of the agricultural reform movement that swept the country in the 1960s and ’70s, a movement she joined as a youth that tried to dignify the lives of small subsistence farmers and secure land rights, and of the brutal repression that followed, with fellow activists seized, tortured and killed in terrible ways.

She spoke of her own imprisonment and her miraculous release, her marriage to a fellow revolutionary and their flight to a slum in Brazil with their new baby and another on the way, of living in exile in miserable conditions in a strange land, nearly dying in childbirth and nearly losing both her children to strange illnesses.
She also spoke of returning to rebuild a devastated movement in the heart of the dictatorship, fighting for a voice in an organization dominated by men, and deciding to team up with her compañeras to continue to struggle for justice in the countryside, but as women. Ten years ago, CONAMURI (Coordinadora National de Mujeres Trabajadores Rurales y Indigenas), her current organization, was formed to solidify that struggle.

Nowadays the dictatorship is but a bitter memory, but its legacy lives on in the millions of landless peasants and indigenous peoples who cluster in shantytowns on the outskirts of the major cities. For Magui and her compañeros, the struggle continues, only the face of the oppressor has changed.

After her presentation for the young people and before her daughter and grandson arrived, we escaped to another space and I was able to ask her about that new, faceless enemy and its impact on the Paraguayan countryside. Her passionate plea poured out like a river for an hour and a half.

(In Magui’s Words: The full interview here)

A piece of Paraguayan paradise: San Rafael preserve

Tracy Barnett

Published: September 27, 2010Posted in: Ecotourism, Environmental education, Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Paraguay, WhyTags: Guyra Paraguay, Paraguay, San Rafael

A piece of Paraguayan paradise: San Rafael preserve

SAN RAFAEL RESERVE, Alto Vera Department, Paraguay – “You are about to enter the most beautiful place in the world,” Daniel advised me as we bumped along on the rutted red road, which was growing more rutted and narrower by the minute as the dark forest closed in around us. Waist-high ferns and vine-draped trees rose in the darkness.

It had been two and a half hours since we’d left Encarnacion, Paraguay’s southern hub on the banks of the Parana, and it had been nearly an hour since we’d seen any kind of human habitation. Instead, miles and miles of wheat fields stretched to the horizon – the winter crop here, which will be harvested soon to make way for Roundup-Ready soy.

“The changes here in Alto Vera have been really dramatic in the past few years,” Daniel tells me. He’s watched as the vast Atlantic forests of his native land and the small farms that once dotted them have fallen, mile after mile, to make way for these fields.

“What’s happening is very sad,” he said. “The campesinos who have lived and farmed here all their lives are in a very precarious situation – if they have one bad season, they will be hungry all year. When a big producer comes to them and offers them money for their land, many of them can’t refuse. At $6,000 a hectare, it’s an inconceivable amount of money – they think they’ll be able to live on it for years, and they move to the city. Within a year or two, it’s all gone.”

My time in Paraguay has been colored in so many ways by the sadness of its history. I’ve come to San Rafael, however, to leave that behind for two precious days and nights in a place where a fragment of Paraguay’s former paradise remains, and a dedicated team of conservationists is working to preserve and restore it.

Among many other roles, Daniel Espinola is supervisor of operations at San Rafael and a member of the team at Guyra Paraguay, one of the country’s leading conservation groups. Its name is derived from the Guaraní word for “bird,” given that the organization’s founding mission was the preservation of bird habitat, but the group has grown far beyond its origins.

It was 10:30 by the time we arrived, and night had closed in on the forest long ago, so I would have to wait to judge the accuracy of Daniel’s description. “One always thinks their own land is the most beautiful,” he acknowledged, “so you will have to decide for yourself.”

The research station includes housing for up to 12 visitors; birdwatchers, scientists and ecotourists make their way here from all around the world to see some of the more than 400 different species of birds that make San Rafael their home.

Tomorrow, Daniel told me, I’m going to get to play forest ranger for a day. As I pulled up the comforter in the chilly night and blew out the candle, an absolute silence enveloped me and sleep descended like a warm blanket.

The light was just beginning to stream into my window when an excited commotion arose outside my cabin. It seemed that every bird in creation had gathered in our valley to put on a songbird symphony that very morning. The variety was tremendous; trills and chirps and melodious riffs interlaced in a tapestry of sound that seemed to envelop me in my half-asleep state.

I drowsed and listened for awhile, then threw open the shutters to see a gold-red peeping over the horizon. Joy was in the air; it was infectious. I understood what Daniel had meant.

Before breakfast, I saw a fork-tailed flycatcher, a southern lapwing and a – and was personally saluted by what looked like a versicolored emerald hummingbird who darted into my cabin door, hovered near me for a moment and darted back out. Afterwards I tried to settle in to do a bit of writing before our morning outing but the excitement going on outside my window was too much for me; I grabbed my binoculars and in no time had spotted a plush-crested jay and a ferruginous pygmy owl.

My day was filled with activities; I accompanied Ramon and Ariel on their rounds as they checked a series of sand “traps” set up to record the prints of the park’s feline species. I hoped to see a jaguar print and was disappointed, but we did see fox and armadillo prints. I put the binoculars Daniel loaned me to good use, In the afternoon we took a drive through the grasslands and watched as a trio of bright yellow-breasted carpintero campestres (campo flickers, a type of woodpecker) circled a giant termite hill in search of their six-legged prey and conspired to get some decent shots We spotted an amazing streamer-tailed tyrant, similar to a scissortail but with an even more dramatic double-plumed tail and beautiful cinnamon-colored face-markings, which I was also able to photograph.

Spring is bursting on the preserve, with wildflowers dotting the tallgrass prairie and the niño azote, a delicate pink mimosa-type bloom, sprinkling the forest. The male birds are wearing their most impressive plumage and singing their hearts out in hopes of attracting a mate, and migratory species linger in the vicinity, like the tyrannus savanna, the winsome black-and-white fork-tailed flycatcher I had seen in the morning.

Ariel accompanied me on a hike to the river; I watched a spectacular sunset over the mix of grasslands and forest that surround the station, and took in the riot of birdlife around its edges come back to life.

The time passed all too quickly, and soon I was on my way back to the city with Daniel, but not before visiting with a couple of the campesinos whom Guyra is working with to promote sustainable farming practices.

For more information about Guyra Paraguay, visit their website. The group manages four reserves and a wide range of programs and events in Asuncion and throughout Paraguay.

Meanwhile, a little photo tour of San Rafael:

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Multimedia: Paraguay takes hard line on GMOs, “agrotoxins”

Tracy Barnett

Published: September 4, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Paraguay, Podcasts, Transgenics, WhyTags: agrochemicals, GMOs, Monsanto, Paraguay, Roundup, transgenic corn, transgenic soy

Multimedia: Paraguay takes hard line on GMOs, “agrotoxins”

ASUNCION, Paraguay – “In any moderately civilized country if you would spray your pesticides on people, you’d basically go to jail,” said Miguel Lovera, head of Paraguay’s agricultural enforcement agency. “In this country that wasn’t the case. It may still be the case in many places in the country that they may be spraying on the wrong places, on the wrong people, on the wrong animals – but we’re out there to put an end to this situation.”

Lovera is currently under fire for the agency’s destruction of 44 hectares of transgenic corn that were being grown illegally. Transgenic soy is currently the country’s main export, and vast swaths of the countryside have been bulldozed by foreign landowners to make way for the controversial crop, but so far soy is the only transgenic allowed for production.

Environmental and campesino leaders are trying to hold the line in protecting their native corn, and so far, the government is behind them. This podcast, which gives the background, was aired on Progressive Forum on KPFT, 90.1, in Houston, Texas.

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Interview with Paraguay’s Miguel Lovera

Social Forum shifts balance in Paraguay, Latin America

Tracy Barnett

Published: August 16, 2010Posted in: Climate Change, Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Indigenous rights, Mining, Paraguay, Reforestation, Spiritual, WhyTags: Asuncion, Evo Morales, Fernando Lugo, Jose Mujica, Paraguay, Rigoberta Menchu, Social Forum of the Americas, World Social Forum

Social Forum shifts balance in Paraguay, Latin America

ASUNCION, Paraguay – It was an historic moment for Latin America, and perhaps for the world: A former guerilla, a former priest and a former coca grower, now presidents of their respective countries, stood together and addressed the continent’s largest assembly of social organizations.

Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, a former Catholic bishop whose election on April 20, 2008, signaled the end of a six-decade dictatorship, welcomed the Social Forum of the Americas to his country as a much-needed show of international support for his country’s fragile democracy. In addition to battling his own right-wing legislature, judiciary and mass media, the country’s first progressive president just last week began chemotherapy treatments for a newly diagnosed case of lymphoma. In perhaps the most emotional discourse of the entire forum, Lugo spoke from his heart.

“This privileged social forum is one of the lights we can raise like a torch to light the road to change in Latin America,” he said. “For the Paraguayan people, this is a sincere show of brotherhood …your presence is the force that will sustain us for the irreversible road to change in Paraguay.”

Bolivian President Evo Morales, risen from the ranks of indigenous organizers and coca growers, called the moment a sign of the times. “Never in the ’80s or the ’90s would you have seen a president at any of these events – and now we are here to receive your solutions, to convert them into programs and projects to liberate our people.”

The relationship between the forum and the progressive governments of the South has been a reciprocal one, with presidents from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have used it to burnish their images with social movements. The World Social Forum was launched in 2001 in the neighboring country of Brazil as a counterpoint to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and as a meeting place and incubator for social movements across the globe under the theme, “Another World is Possible.”

Over the years the annual event has drawn upwards of 100,000 participants and has become so unwieldy that some have dismissed it as little more than a feel-good talk session or a left-wing carnival. But to many here, the social forum has become a force to be reckoned with, and indeed, a current that has nurtured and informed the continent’s leftward shift over the past decade.

“Critics have said all along that the forum is just a gabfest,” said Marc Becker, longtime forum observer and Latin American historian. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s fundamentally shifted the discourse from neoliberalism and the Washington consensus to an environment that has permitted the rise of the leftist governments we have today.”

Since its inception, the WSF has spun off numerous regional and thematic versions. This week’s gathering, launched Aug. 11 and running through Sunday (Aug. 15), was the fourth hemispheric gathering, and it drew more than 10,000 from all over the Americas and beyond. Its slogan, “Nuestra America está en camino” (Our America is on its way), reflected the optimistic view that significant progress has been made toward achieving that other possible world.

This year’s themes were many and diverse, ranging from climate change and food sovereignty to the impacts of an increasingly industrialized agriculture and the growing number and strength of U.S. military bases throughout the continent.

Whether the forum will manage to shift the debate at the global level remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that it has had significant impact at the regional and certainly at the local level, and within the movements themselves.

Peruvian anti-mining activist Lourdes Huanca actually credits the connections she made at the forum with saving her life and that of other activists during a violent confrontation with the Peruvian government.

“We sent out an e-mail to the contacts we had made saying, ‘Help, they are killing us!’” she said. Via Campesina, a global peasant organization, sent a representative and others responded by putting pressure on the government, and the situation was resolved, she said.

Groups as diverse as the Via Campesina and the Latin American Network of Women Transforming the Economy (REMTE, by its Spanish acronym), some of whose feminist leaders hold multiple academic degrees, come together across borders to strategize on their own issues, and reach out to learn about the struggles of other groups, as well.

Sonia Alvarez of the University of Massachusetts attributes the forum with giving women a much more prominent voice within social movements in the South; Gina Vargas, a fellow member of the Network, agreed.

“When Via Campesina first began having a presence here, the men would say, ‘Here we’ll have our meetings, and there the women will do their cooking,’” said Vargas. “We said, ‘Wait a minute!’”

As the Via Campesina women began to interact with strong women leaders, the power balance began to shift. This year, one of the most dynamic speakers from the central stage was Magui Balbuena, a campesina leader from Paraguay.

Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, who was received with perhaps even more excitement than any of the presidents, joined a panel defining the concept of “buen vivir,” or living well – a counterpoint promoted by the new Latin American left as a counterpoint to the individualist striving for the better life promoted by industrialist societies, a striving that speakers said impoverishes the planet through mindless consumerism.

‎”Our elders taught us that what we can take with our hands is ours; what doesn’t fit is for someone else. It’s selfishness that caused us to take the rest and put it in a bag for ourselves – and that selfishness is destroying the world,” she said.

One area in which the forum has the potential for a greater global impact is in the area of climate change. Groups preparing for the upcoming climate talks in Cancun, a follow-up to Copenhagen, have been working behind the scenes since April’s WSF-styled People’s Climate Summit in Cochabamba to further the development of an International Court for Climate Justice. Their sessions laid the groundwork for a multifaceted approach in Cancun.

Back in Paraguay, it’s hard to measure the impact on local social movements, but farmer Braulio Anibal Avalos provided a little insight when he stopped me on the stairs after a workshop to tell me how excited he was.
“This forum has completely changed my way of looking at the world,” said Avalos, whose family has been involved since before his birth in a fight to reclaim their cooperative’s land after it was seized by the Paraguayan government for supposed subversive activity.

Paraguay’s difficult past – first, a war with neighboring countries in which it lost more than half its territory, followed by the dictatorship – has made Paraguayans insular and isolated, he said.

“I’ve always been extremely nationalist because of our history,” he said. “But today, as I look around and discover the thousands of people from other countries who are struggling for a better world, I realize the fight is not just ours. I realize we are not alone.”

Here are a few images from the Fourth Social Forum of the Americas:

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Archaeologist shifts focus to modern-day Mayans

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 16, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, ProPeten, WhyTags: environment, Guatemala, Latin America, Maya, Mayans, Peten, ProPeten, Rosa Maria Chan, Sustainable development

Archaeologist shifts focus to modern-day Mayans

POPTUN, Guatemala – It’s been a long day, and Rosa Maria Chan is still not finished. She’s traveled for hours on twisty, rocky country roads, held community meetings in three villages, toured a cacao farm, met with the liaison for funding from the World Bank and a tilapia farmer, answered questions all day long from a visiting journalist, checked in with the Guatemalan Vice-Minister of the Environment and a score of others via cell phone, and ate a hasty dinner while checking her e-mail.

It’s 9 p.m., and by most people’s standards, it would be a good time to turn in. She has a two-day workshop on watershed protection beginning tomorrow, and she needs to prepare.

But now the mayor of Poptun is here, visiting with a Guatemalan legislator who is head of the committee on environment, and she has some networking to do.

There’s no such thing as down time for Rosa Maria Chan, director of ProPeten, archaeologist turned administrator of one of the country’s most respected environmental organizations. The tireless drive she once applied in six-day jungle expeditions, like the one where she discovered an ancient Mayan village she named Zapote Corozal, she now channels into marathon searches for funding.

This time, however, she’s motivated not by the call of an ancient people but the spirit of their descendents, migrants who have been pushed off their land by poverty and war. These are the people she sees as key to a stable, sustainable future for a seriously troubled region.

The Peten, home of Tikal and a host of other magnificent Mayan cities, takes up a third of Guatemala; it is the largest of the country’s states, or departments. Until relatively recently, it was an untamed jungle wilderness. In the 1960s, that began to change, with the construction of a new highway, followed by wealthy landowners coming in and clearing the jungle to make way for enormous cattle ranches. These landowners, called latifundistas, were seeking a calmer place to live, away from the conflicts in the highlands resulting from an attempt at agrarian reform, and Kek’chi and Mopan Mayas moved there to work the plantations.

The ‘70s and ‘80s brought a different sort of migrant, those fleeing violence in their homelands in the highlands. In three decades, the population of the area increased 10 percent each year; in 1990, the former wilderness was home to 300,000. But the bulk of the newcomers didn’t find the good farmland they were hoping for, as most of that had already been snatched up by the latifundistas. Instead they settled on parcels on the hillsides and planted their milpas as they had for centuries. The forest was decimated.

In 1990 the government responded to international pressure to preserve what was left of the forest – mainly a huge swath of jungle and wetlands in the north, where the Maya Biosphere Reserve was created, forming the largest natural preserve in Central America. In 1995 it followed suit with four smaller preserves in the south of Peten.

In theory, it sounded good. The problem was that the people living there had nowhere to go. A long-range plan to resettle them was not carried out, and continued population growth led more and more people to invade the preserves, causing escalating conflicts, especially in the region of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, where ProPeten – at that time a project of Conservation International – had a field station to do research and work with local communities to protect the preserve.

Unfortunately, people in the local communities saw the environmental community as a threat to their survival. The tensions culminated in the burning of the field station and a highly publicized incident in which members of the ProPeten staff were held hostage.

This was all before Rosa Maria’s time, but she relates the history as if it were her own – as it was soon to be, as Carlos Sosa, her longtime friend and mentor and the founder and director of ProPeten, asked her to become the head of its board of directors. “I know you, and I know you will never sell out ProPeten,” he told her.

The hostage crisis, Rosa Maria says, just brought to a head the differences in philosophy between the staff of Conservation International and the local staff of ProPeten. As she sees it, Conservation International, like most of the mainline conservation organizations at the time, took a strictly conservation-oriented approach, whereas the local staff recognized the need to integrate social policies into the organization, a need that CI failed to respond to.

“That’s why I refer to myself – and to ProPeten – as an environmentalist, not a conservationist,” Rosa Maria told me on the day we met. “I see people as part of the environment, and if you don’t include them in your plan, it will fail.”

Sosa gave up trying to convince the Conservation International leadership to change their strategy and decided it was time to separate. What ensued was a painful power struggle that Rosa Maria euphemistically calls “a divorce.” As chair of the board of directors, she was drawn into the struggle. It was a nightmarish time that she doesn’t like to recall, especially the most painful part. During that year, Sosa was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and soon after, he died.

The board of directors called an emergency meeting and immediately asked Rosa Maria to take over as director. It was a difficult decision, as she was currently involved in a high-profile archaeological project at Piedras Negras, listed as one of the world’s most endangered historical sites by UNESCO. The organization was left nearly bankrupt and without even an office or supplies after the rift with CI. Most people would have run in the opposite direction.

But Rosa Maria felt called to the task. She finished her two-month commitment at Piedras Negras and set to work rebuilding the organization. Seven years later, by all accounts, her work has paid off; ProPeten is seen locally, nationally and internationally as one of Guatemala’s most successful environmental organizations.

One key to Rosa Maria’s success has been her longtime experience working with government and nonprofit agencies. She started by working her way through college in a job with the Guatemalan Secretary of Planning. Here she learned how to do budgets and negotiate the system, and she began to build allies at the national level. She later held jobs with several other nonprofits, including the German nonprofit GTZ, and learned how to write fundraising proposals.

On a normal day, she juggles telephones and e-mail accounts and meetings with the agility of an acrobat. But today, she’s left all that behind to enjoy the fresh air of the countryside and meet with some of the communities she’ll be raising funds for. I’ve been invited to ride along, because this is really the only time she has to meet with me. So she and two ProPeten staffers, Elder Hernandez and Hector Choc, explain to me some of the many programs ProPeten is sponsoring in the countryside as we bump along a country road past scorched hillsides and grazing cattle.

On this particular day, she’s meeting with some of the five communities that have expressed an interest in starting cacao farms. Rosa Maria is approaching international foundations to find the funding for this project, and she wants to be sure the communities are prepared to invest the time necessary for a successful project.
“Cacao is a good thing to promote here because it’s native to the area, and it’s part of their indigenous tradition,” she explained. “It requires shade, so it’s a form of agroforestry, which protects the soils and the watersheds.”

Ultimately, however, perhaps the most important result is to give these families a way to earn a living on their own land without slashing, burning and using it up, as so many families have done. It will also give them the incentive to resist the land speculators coming through to buy up tracts for the oil palm companies, which ProPeten and other environmental groups see as an increasing threat to the region.

Other programs that ProPeten is sponsoring now throughout the countryside include tilapia ponds, ecotourism projects, a educational program with a soap opera and xate cultivation – xate is a native plant used by the floral industry which has been severely depleted in Guatemalan forests by foraging campesinos who sell it to make a living.

In fact, the illegal harvesting of xate has grown to the point that, as Guatemalan forests have been depleted, people have been crossing over the border to Belize to harvest their xate. The plant is now in danger of extinction and the government has passed a law requiring xate dealers to verify that their harvests come from legitimate sources. Guatemalan incursions into Belize for xate harvesting is on the decline in the past year, Rosa Maria’s Belizian contacts have told her, in part due to the new law and in part because of the xate cultivation promoted by ProPeten.

After two days in the communities come two days of meetings of an entirely different sort: local and regional leaders gather to map out a strategy for watershed protection. Then, on Saturday, a meeting with a local women’s cooperative.

While Rosa Maria’s work may be tiring, it is not without its rewards. Southern Peten has embraced her with open arms, and everyone from the mayor to the local agriculture administrator and the head of the regional planning department shows up to spend two days mapping out a watershed management plan under her direction.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Rosa Maria since the beginning of my administration and I’ve seen the success she’s had administering this organization and working with the local groups and the municipality,” said Poptun Mayor Angel Kilkán Ochoa. “She’s a woman of enormous vision, and I wish we had 10 or more people like her, and that all the municipalities would work with her and her team to lift up our communities together.”

Donald Perez, coordinator of the regional organization of community leaders, agreed. “I would say that today, ProPeten is the NGO with the weight and experience to represent the initiatives of conservation and human development in Peten – and given that Peten represents a third of Guatemala, we could say that we’re really good ambassadors for conservation at an international level for our country, thanks to the live experiences of ProPeten that are excellent examples.”

Here are some images from the four days I spent with Rosa Maria, Hector and Elder. The videotaped interview with Rosa Maria (above) is available only in Spanish at this time – sorry!). For more information about ProPeten, visit their website, www.ProPeten.org.

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Permaculture takes root in Lake Atitlan

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 8, 2010Posted in: Environmental education, Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Organic agriculture, Permaculture, WhyTags: Guatemala, I'jatz, IMAP, Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, Permacultura America Latina, permaculture, Rebecca Cutter, Ronaldo Lec, Rony Lec, seed banks

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – Rony Lec is roasting coffee beans on a clay comal when I arrive, stirring patiently as the smoke rises. He grew the coffee out back, and every step of the process, like many of his processes, is his own.

We’re seated at his kitchen table now, in the home he designed and built, sharing a cup of the freshest coffee I’ve ever tasted. A soft-spoken Kakchiquel Maya with a loose ponytail and a gentle voice, Rony takes a sip of the fragrant brew and settles in to tell me his story.

The light filters in pleasantly from above through a skylight, an artfully placed series of bamboo tubes and the brown, green and white glass cylinders high above us that are set into the adobe walls. Later I learn, to my surprise, that these colorful cylinders are discarded bottles.

A tree trunk with its gracefully gnarled limbs emerges somewhere from the wrought-iron staircase; a lamp woven from bamboo hangs above us. The stone wall and arched door of the sauna in the background, the lush greenery of the garden out back and the savory aroma of home-grown and home-cooked food complete the picture of natural harmony.

I am at home with a permaculturist.

Permaculture, for the uninitiated, is a design system that incorporates everything from agriculture to architecture to community and organizational development into an elegant system that works in harmony with nature.

How permaculture came to this tiny village amid the volcanoes on the shores of Lake Atitlan is a story as winding as the canals Rony designed to slow down the torrential floodwaters here.

Rony was one of the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were blown apart by the 36-year civil war. He was just a boy when his father was killed by the army.

“My family was always involved in community development and organizing, and that was the reality in those days; anyone who was working with the community was perceived as a threat.”

His family, in fear for their lives, fled to the United States with the help of the Catholic diocese of New Ulm, Minn., which has a strong presence in this village.

Rony studied at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, earning a degree in cultural anthropology, but always with the idea of coming back home and applying it in a way that would make a difference for his people.
“I never wanted to gain knowledge just to put it in a book on a shelf,” he said. “For me, knowledge has to go beyond theory, it’s something you must put into practice.”

Returning home in 1994, when the conflict had calmed and negotiations were underway, he looked around for a project that could apply what he’d learned about his roots in the Mayan tradition, a tradition interwoven with the rhythms of nature.

“My idea was how to reconstruct and rescue the traditional, ancestral knowledge, and of course much of that had to do with agriculture, because that’s the base of our culture.”

On his own he read far and wide about alternative agricultural practices, and he began to dig into the ancient traditions of his own people. He found his first project on a piece of flood-prone land near the lake, owned by the Catholic Diocese. The land was compacted from many years of cattle grazing, and it flooded, along with the surrounding homes, every rainy season.

Rony asked for the land to try out the ancient system known in ancient Nahuatl as chinampas. The chinampa system is most famously illustrated by the design of ancient Mexico City, which was built by diverting the waters of a swampy lake into canals. Xochimilco, a historic neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, is the last vestige of the old chinampa system.

Here in the Guatemalan highlands, the Kakchiquel Maya had the same concept with a different name, but it fell out of use many years ago with the advent of modern agriculture.

Rony organized a group of subsistence farmers to help him analyze the situation and reclaim the land so that they could farm it, and they spent weeks digging the ditches that would slow down and channelize the rushing waters. But come rainy season, it didn’t work; the canals were clogged with sediment, and the project was swamped.

“Of course, in the anthropology books they tell you about the chinampas, but they don’t tell you how to build them,” he recalls with a laugh.

That’s when he was invited to a conference in the States on traditional agricultural practices, and he decided to make the trip with a dual purpose: to visit the Santa Fe-based center of Permacultura America Latina.

It was there at the “permaculture mansion” of one of the PAL board members that Rony began to realize the potential of permaculture to transform living systems. He explained his plan to PAL founder Ali Sharif, who took a look and quickly diagnosed the problem. The canals he had made were linear and angular – not like anything you’d find in nature. The trick to designing systems that work well is in mimicking nature, Sharif explained, working with nature instead of against it.

The trip was a breakthrough for him, and he ended up making another trip to Australia to study with the legendary Bill Mollison, one of the founders of the permaculture system.

Soon after his trip to Australia, he was joined by Rebecca Cutter, an artist, designer and educator from New York, who had heard about Rony’s group, then called Ija’tz, the Kakchiquel word for seeds. All she knew about the project was that it combined design and organic agriculture in some innovative ways. She came down to volunteer and ended up staying.

The new chinampa design was by all accounts a success. Rebecca took me on a tour and I was able to see the lush forest they had created on this urban tract of about 60 by 150 meters, where there once was only barren, compacted ground. It was raining, so I saw the canal system at work.

“What this does is slow the water down,” Rebecca explained. “Fast water is destructive.”

Runoff from surrounding hillsides carries tons of soil, silt, sand and other debris with it, which formerly ended up in the houses of the people who were flooded each year. Now the water as well as the soil it carries is retained on the land, and at the end of each rainy season when the canals dry up, the farmers empty them of that season’s load of rich soil, sand and silt, piling it up on the sides. In this way, mounds of rich, fertile soil a meter high or more has been built along the meandering canals.

A profusion of tropical plant life, much of it edible, sprouts from those hills. Rebecca shows me the house where they once lived on the site, and a “banana circle,” a permaculture technique involving a circle of banana palms used to treat greywater.

IxChel, Rebecca and Rony’s curly-haired, bright and energetic daughter, accompanies us on the tour, running off to gather wild strawberries and yellow flowers to share with us.

The growers collective who made up Ija’tz eventually decided to focus their energy around the production and commercialization of organic coffee. Rony and Rebecca supported their decision but wanted to continue promoting Permaculture with a focus on the protection of genetic diversity both locally and throughout Mesoamerica. So in 2000, Rony and Rebecca founded the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, or IMAP, and the two associations continue to collaborate and support each other.

In the decade since its founding, the group has organized local growers to produce seeds and vegetables organically and has helped to create fair trade markets and seed exchanges with farmers and organizations working locally and throughout Guatemala; set up a center that has adapted the permaculture system to a subtropical and indigenous setting; where they’ve taught hundreds of students, both local and international; and responded to the disaster created by Hurricane Stan with low-tech water treatment systems, soil conservation practices, community gardens and other appropriate-technology approaches to disaster relief.

Perhaps their biggest success has been the establishment of a seed bank, housing seeds from thousands of native plants and disseminating them among local growers to keep them in circulation. The seed bank is a concept that has been growing in response to an increased homogenization of agriculture, with corporate growers pressuring local varieties out of existence.

Now, however, it’s time for us to go, and the rain is growing stronger. My tour of IMAP and the seed bank will have to wait for another day.

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Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 1, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, Organic agriculture, Semilla Nueva, WhyTags: Curt Bowen, Food Security, Guatemala, Joseph Bornstein, Organic agriculture, Semilla Nueva, sustainable agriculture

Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

(Above: Curt Bowen, right, and Joseph Bornstein)

ALMOLONGA, Guatemala – Ramón Siquina has depended on insecticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like everyone else in this green produce basket of the Quetzaltenango province. But nowadays, he’s using fewer of them.

“Fertilizers have helped us a lot, and it was a great advance for us,” he said. “But we’ve been conscious that the state of our soil is deteriorating. We began using lots of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, which we wouldn’t have to use if the land was still rich like in the times of our forefathers.”

We’re standing on the roof of his cement-block home, a soft mist descending over the green valleys and hills surrounding us. Almalonga, a community of 20,000 on the outskirts of Xela, is unusual in that the forefathers saved the richest soils in the valley for agriculture, and built the homes around the fields and up into the hills. For years the community has produced the huge truckloads of cabbage, squash, corn, lettuce and radishes that feed the city, but it’s getting harder.

“I’ve struggled and struggled with this piece of land; I put all the chemicals possible on it, and it still didn’t produce,” Ramón was saying. “I realized I had to change the way I was growing.”

That’s when he met the folks from Semilla Nueva (meaning “new seed” in Spanish), a new organization formed by a group of high school and college buddies from the Pacific Northwest. They began to talk about farming practices and Rafael shared his problem. Curt Bowen and Trinidad Recinos, two of the group’s founders, suggested compost as an alternative to chemical fertilizer and offered to help him set up a composting vermiculture project, and that’s how we all ended up tonight on Ramón’s roof, with Ramón and Joseph combing through the garbage to examine the progress of the squirming colonies of worms.

“God gives us a way of showing us what we need,” said Ramón. “It’s a small project now, but one day it will be big.”

****

Oregonian Joseph Bornstein was just 18 when he made his first trip to Nicaragua with a couple of buddies from the Ashland High School Class of 2003 in Oregon. They had decided to take a gap year to travel in Central America before beginning college.

“We’d learned a lot about the world from books and from our desks, but we wanted to learn about it for ourselves.”

The friends made their way down to San Juan del Sur, a fishing village near the border with Costa Rica, where they made a friendship that would change their lives. Their friend was Alix Fermin, a fisherman and a father of a delightful 3-year-old.

“He was such a loving, joy-filled person,” recalls Bornstein wistfully. The friends spent some carefree days with the family, learning about the family’s culture and way of life. Three months later, they learned that Alix had died in a fishing accident – a not uncommon occurrence, given the rudimentary nature of the equipment the poor villagers used in those parts.

“We put our heads together to see if there was a way we could provide a long-term form of support for the family, since their breadwinner was no more,” Bornstein said. The friends decided to pool their resources and build a house that the family could rent out so they would always have income. They raised $8,000 and headed south in 2005 to build the home.

In the interim, much had changed. A spike in the petroleum prices had caused the prices of basic necessities to double. “That woke us up to the need for more structural change,” said Bornstein.

That was when Curt Bowen, a college buddy, got into the picture. By that time, Bowen and Bornstein were studying at Whitman College in Washington State and hit on the idea of building a biofuel network in Central America, teaching local farmers. They laid the groundwork for a series of workshops throughout the Americas and made plans to establish resource centers in each community. The idea was to teach organized communities, community leaders, and non-profits processor fabrication and biofuel production. Two professors from Whitman helped them design an independent study course, and a friend in Antigua offered to loan them a Guatemalan chicken bus for the experiment, and they were set.

They converted the bus for biodiesel, and with 400 gallons of the stuff, made their way from Washington State all the way down to Nicaragua, teaching farmers and community members how to convert waste crop materials to fuel and setting up an infrastructure to keep the project going after they left.

The project was a good one, but as their studies progressed, they realized that it didn’t really address a more fundamental issue.

“For biofuels to be done well, you have to start with organic agriculture,” said Curt. Much of the world’s biofuel production is coming from palm oil forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, he pointed out; 89 percent of rainforest deforestations come from biofuel production. Making matters worse is that after the forests are slashed, the peat bogs underlying them are drained and burned to make more biofuels, and the resultant emissions have made Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gases.

A sad and ironic turn of events for a supposedly green technology.

So the friends began to think of ways they could work with local farmers to promote a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and they recruited more friends from Whitman and from Ashland for their next project: Semilla Nueva. They also contacted Trinidad, a Guatemalan palm oil grower they had met on the biodiesel trip who had embraced their project with such an innovative spirit they recruited him to join their project.

One of the first things they did was visit the Ministry of Agriculture, where they were brought into an office with an impressive desk made of tropical wood. Embedded in the design was a small plaque: “Donated by Dow Chemical Co.” Soon they noticed the plush sofa had been donated by Monsanto.

“It turned out that every piece of furniture in that place had been donated by a chemical company,” laughed Curt.

Guatemalan agriculture has been heavily dominated by the chemical industry and utilizes products that were banned in the states a long time ago, resulting in damaging runoff, pesticide poisoning of unprotected workers, depleted soils and other ills, they explained.

Alternative farming practices had been introduced in the country, but there’s little support and follow-through with these projects, Curt said. In a country of more than a corn million farmers, there are 17 government corn specialists available to offer assistance.

There are a number of NGOs currently working in the country on sustainable agriculture projects, but most are isolated from each other and working on specific projects, Semilla Nueva’s goal, with the help of a Dutch organization called Gota Verde (Green Drop), was to fill in the gaps.

“One of the biggest problems in development is not a lack of technology; it’s getting that technology out to the people who need it,” said Curt. “For example, conservation tillage – a practice that’s very easy to use, but nobody’s using it here because nobody’s promoting it.”

Now they’re working on a variety of projects in the surrounding countryside, and one that they’re most excited about is a joint project with a Spanish NGO called Intervida. They will be training promotores, or community-based educators, who are already working for Intervida to spread the word about (health??). Now they’ll also be able to teach sustainable farming techniques, from composting and contour ditches to living barriers and shuffle hoes.

The pair’s faces light up when they talk about “action research,” a strategy for working together with local farmers to experiment their way toward the best practices for each farm. Just as Ramón is measuring the progress of his two differently managed vermiculture bins, local farmers will be experimenting with techniques that allow them to wean their dependence from chemical inputs.

Now with a new associate, Darren Yondorf, and with two more staff members on the way, the group will be fully staffed within two weeks – just in time to receive the first round of volunteers from Yale, Kentucky University, the University of Puget Sound and of course their alma mater Whitman College. The volunteers will be living out on the farms, working with farmers to help them incorporate the new practices and monitor the results.

But the most ambitious part of their project is perhaps the most important, and also the hardest to measure. By working within local farmer associations and helping to build others, they are hoping to build community leadership through sustainable agriculture practices.

“As the promotores become involved in the research, the impact will grow,” said Curt. “We’re trying to promote sustainable agriculture, but we’re trying to build unity in the community as well.”

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Albert Bates on The Great Change

Tracy Barnett

Published: April 22, 2010Posted in: Belize, Climate Change, Featured, Food Security, Maya Mountain Research Farm, Permaculture, WhyTags: Albert Bates, biochar, climate change, peak oil, permaculture, The Great Change

(above: Albert Bates, left, with fellow permaculture instructors Hector Reyes and Maria Ros.)

Today in honor of Earth Day I am posting a recent interview with Albert Bates, co-founder of The Farm in Tennessee, the Global Ecovillage Network, author of “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook” and the upcoming “The Biochar Solution.”

It was my privilege to spend some time with him and fellow permaculture teachers Maria Ros and Hector Reyes at a permaculture training course at Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize recently, and I can honestly say that few people have inspired me as he has of the urgent necessity to return to the basics of caring for ourselves and our Mother Earth.

I wrote about the workshop in “Life lessons on Maya Mountain” and “From one jungle to another: A modern-day pioneer.”

I was also able to do a brief three-part interview with Albert, which I’ve just edited and uploaded to YouTube. In Part I, he discusses what he calls The Great Change – the inevitable shift to a society less dependent on petroleum and other resources that are approaching their natural limits.

“Can we have a transition that’s graceful and fun, and can we create a society that comes after that’s better than the one that was before?” Bates asks. “That’s a matter of some debate – some people believe that won’t be the case, but I believe that it is possible.” His book “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook” discusses this theme in depth and gives practical solutions, which he discusses in this interview.

Since The Esperanza Project, my new media initiative, is focused on the sustainability movement in Latin America, in Part II, I asked him to discuss the lessons he’s learned in his travels in the south. His answers are surprising.

In Part III, Bates discusses his new book, “The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change,” he discusses the potential of a biological technology called biochar as a source of clean energy, a rich soil supplement and a powerful carbon sequestration device.