Farmers and Biodiversity:
Replanting forests, Rebuilding Land and Livelihoods
from the Magazine of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies 2003
FES AgroEcology Team Research *
Photos

     What does agriculture have to do with the environment? Farming is by far the greatest user of land and fresh-water resources worldwide. More forests are felled for the expansion of farm plots, pastures, and plantations than for timber harvests. Does that mean that that farmers are the enemies of forests? Not so, according to six FES graduate students and their advisor, Professor Kathleen McAfee. The FES Agroecology Team returned in September from research in five Latin American countries and India, where they are studying farming, livelihoods, and conservation in biologically rich but economically poor regions. They have found that while agriculture and conservation can be at odds, they can also support each other. At present, most government and international aid and trade policies encourage environmentally destructive forms of agriculture. The Agro-Eco Team findings suggest that better alternatives are possible and that they have strong support from farmers in the developing world.

     Elizabeth Shapiro (MESc ‘03) and Dr. McAfee interviewed indigenous Mixtec farmers in the highlands east of Oaxaca, Mexico, where overgrazing has created an eroded, desert-like landscape. Poverty and underpopulation have made things worse: as people leave in search of jobs, families lose the people-power to maintain their traditional, terraced farm plots. But today, in a region studied by FES students since the 1990s, communities are transforming these barren zones into havens of oak, pine, and mixed forests, where wildlife is returning and dry springs have come back to life. To these farmers, farming and conservation are inseparable. By “building” forests, they are also rebuilding their own livelihoods. In the words of Jesus León Santos, president one local farmers’ organization, Centro de Desarollo Integral Campesino de la Mixteca (CEDICAM, or Mixtec Farmers Integrated Development Center),

Being a campesino is a vocation as important as any profession. We produce the food, and we  are responsible for conservation of most of the natural resources: without us, they’ll be exploited and sold off… Our land has been abused, but we’re planting many more trees: 200,000 this year alone. Land that was so sad to look at is now green and beautiful again, as you can see. These forests aid the climate and the water for our own fields and for people in the city. They give us craft and construction materials, fuel wood, fodder and organic matter. But our people eat maize, not trees, so we are conserving agricultural land, too, for our survival.

CEDICAM is encouraging its members to phase out chemical fertilizers in favor of animal and green manures and compost from leaves shed by the regrowing forests. Josefina Jiménez Lopez, explained that, after taking the value of their labor into account, the organization calculated that the extra work required to use organic fertilizer costs no more than purchasing and transporting synthetic inputs. Fidel Cruz Pablo whose own bountiful farm demonstrates the wisdom of his words and the skills of his wife, Fidelia, told us:

Chemicals seem like a miracle at first, but we soon see the decline of the soil. After only five years, you can’t grow anything without them. Then it takes a while to rebuild the soil…. We also are also using crop rotations, planting more varieties, and encouraging beneficial insects. We live in a healthy place, and we have to care for the health of our soil because it’s reflected in the health of our plants and of ourselves.
     Mexican small farmers perform another vital service to society by conserving agricultural genetic resources. CEDICAM members have names for at least 14 locally-planted wheat varieties, 31 types of beans and pulses, 10 groups of maize varieties, and more than 200 horticultural and medicinal plants that they cultivate or collect. Families prize their red, blue, yellow, white, and multicolored strains of corn, some of which are remarkably productive and drought-tolerant and might provide plant breeders and other farmers with valuable traits for hardier strains of corn.

     Farmers in Oaxaca are struggling to maintain their crop and livestock genetic resources, however, because of the effects of trade liberalization and the integration of their region into transnational agro-food systems. The flooding of Mexican markets with cheaper, imported US corn —considered vastly inferior in taste and cooking quality by these farmers— has meant that they cannot sell their maize harvests in nearby towns at a price high enough to recover their production costs. They face similar problems with their livestock and their beans, which are now undersold by “Michigo” (Michigan) black beans grown in the U.S.. According to the farmers, buyers affiliated with an international grain-trading firm are demanding more standardized products, such as single-colored maize varieties, which they then mix with imported corn and sell with a deceptive “local” label.

     These villagers are not passively accepting the fate —extinction as agriculturalists— that the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture envisions for them. They are joining with other Mexican campesinos in calling for the reversal of NAFTA (North American Free-trade Agreement) rules that favor the products of the heavily-subsidized U.S. industrial-farming system.

     In the Ecuadorian Andes, Jonathan Cook (MESc ‚04) found evidence that indigenous farmers are continuing long traditions of sustainable agriculture, including the use of local varieties and intercropping, with support from international aid groups and university researchers. However, these smallholders face tremendous economic pressures from abroad. With cheaper food imports underselling locally produced goods and the national economy stumbling under crushing foreign debt, markets for local crops are depressed. Still, many farmers have found niche opportunities by devoting part of their fields to commercial crops while growing potatoes, corn, and vegetables for self-consumption and weekly town markets. In the wildly beautiful cordillera west of Latacunga, miles of steep fields are sown with the beautiful violet flowers of chocho, a type of lupine sold in bulk for medicinal use. Despite fears that the proposed “Free Trade Area of the Americas” treaty could fill Ecuadorian markets with more subsidized crops from the United States, these farmers are working hard to protect and enhance their traditional farming methods and ways of life.

     In Western El Salvador, Avery Cohn (MESc‚ 04) worked with coffee cooperatives whose members help to steward forested, mountain agroecosystems by planting their coffee bushes in the shade of native trees. Livelihoods are not won easily there. A global plunge in coffee prices has lowered prices farmers are paid for green coffee beans, while adoption of the U.S. dollar as El Salvador’s currency has increased their production costs. Many farmers can no long afford to apply chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This has meant a temporary drop in yields, and hunger for some farm families, but it has also paved the way towards entry into more lucrative organic-coffee markets and more environmentally benign coffee systems. Cohn is working with the Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Rural Development and Conservation (ASINDEC) to help farmers through this transition.

     Small farmers cannot rely solely on export crops, which go through cycles of boom and bust. By intercropping a variety of grains, beans, and vegetables with coffee and rainforest trees, they are producing for their own subsistence as well as domestic and international markets. Increasingly, development agencies are turning to these biodiversity-rich agroecosystems as a promising development model. In their determination to remain on the land, the coffee co-ops are resisting what they speak of a political war against small-scale farming. They feel alienated from both the political left, which has focused on industrial development, and the right, which sponsors trade liberalization and favors wealthier, large-scale farmers.

     Similar lessons emerged from the state of Para in Brazil. Corrina Steward (MESc ’04) found that in Santarém, a region along the Amazon rich in agricultural and natural diversity, fertile soils known as terra preta (black earth) are being transformed into soybean fields. In recent decades the region has been occupied by small-scale farmers, many of whom do not hold deeds to their farms. They have managed to integrate commercial rice and corn crops with native fruit and medicinal trees to meet their subsistence and income needs. Now, the rapid introduction of agro-industry threatens their livelihoods. It is converting a diverse landscape into a grain mono-culture in which the smallholders cannot compete. One farmer asked, “What will I do without my land? How will my family survive?”

     The spread of soy plantations into Amazonia is propelled by the profitable global soybean market that feeds livestock and produces cooking oil—and our tofu!. In addition, Brazil’s need for U.S. dollars to pay its debt and meet national development goals encourages the displacement of forests and small farmers by vast acres of soybeans, in spite of a world soy surplus. While many smallholders around Santarém have ceded their land to soy farmers from Southern Brazil, others say they will never leave. With the support of the Rural Workers Union (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais), they are opposing the expansion of agro-industry for exports and generating local and government support for family agriculture and local products.

     Small-scale farmers in Mexico, Brazil, and other countries are part of a growing, international movement for “food sovereignty”: the right of countries and communities to produce food and to make informed, ecologically sound about where and how their food will be grown. Their troubles and their achievements illustrate that farming need be the enemy of the environment only if unsound policies make it so.

     Some of these farmers and others will soon be coming to Yale to share their experiences, along with US and Latin American experts on agroecology. From the 15th through the 17th of April, the Agro-Eco team will sponsor a working conference on Agroecology, Biodiversity, and Food Sovereignty. Farmers, scholars, and student researchers will exchange practical knowledge, debate the pros and cons of new biotechnologies, and discuss the challenges of agro-food globalization.

* Avery Cohn, Jonathan Cook, and Corrina Steward contributed to this article. Other FES students working on agroecology and food sovereignty include Margarita Fernandez (MESc 04), who has has been working in Cuba and New York, Nikhil Anand (MESc 04), who has been working in India.

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