Cmo se llega a la agroecologa
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I’m here to tell you a story.
The story of my family
and that of thousands of families
who come from Bolivia and produce
the fruits and vegetables
that are served every day
at Argentine tables.
I have the memory of my family
crossing the border,
fearful of being asked papers
that we don’t have
and not being allowed to pass.
Why do you end up leaving your country?
When I was a little girl, my relatives
came to visit us from Argentina
and they would always ask me,
“where do we change these dollars?”
With a 100 dollars you bought
anything in a small town.
That was the dream we all had.
Coming to Argentina,
work for a couple of years,
buy your house, start a business
and return to your town with money.
Some made it, but most
still don’t come back.
We came here with our beliefs,
the wisdom of our grandparents
who cared for and cultivated the Pachamama
thousands of years ago.
But when you get here,
it’s like you get a head reboot.
The need to produce in quantity
a single variety of vegetables comes up,
getting them off the ground
as soon as possible.
We put the agrochemical that we are told,
sometimes double or triple the amount,
thinking it’s going to be better.
The rent of land
go up every month.
So families get in debt.
And any storm, frost or poor harvest
makes families enslave day and night
to be able to sow again.
Three, five, ten years go by and
they’re in the same condition, or worse.
The seeds are also in dollars.
So you can’t buy varieties.
Everybody ends up buying
the same lettuce that’s cheaper,
dumping the market with lettuce
that nobody sells.
It’s either thrown away
or the tractor goes over it.
You get to agroecology
out of love or pain.
But generally out of pain.
Because a natural disaster happens
that leaves you with nothing,
because a relative gets intoxicated
or our children are born with disease.
Because of debt and the dollar going up.
That happened to my family in 2017.
There was a storm that destroyed
all the greenhouses in the area.
At that time we rented three fields
and we barely had to eat.
We were in debt,
exhausted, separated,
we couldn’t even sit down
to eat together.
The week of the storm
we attended some agroecology workshops
dictated by the UTT.
The technician giving the workshop told us
that there was a way
of changing production.
That you could produce being free.
Without having to depend on anyone.
And that you could be happy
working the land.
Nobody knew that word.
But that is agroecology.
We got back home and began
with ten furrows.
Really afraid of losing with them.
After six months
there were already 10 acres.
To agroecology
you also get for love.
When colleagues show up
beyond individual benefits,
they accompany you, and they show you
that you’re not alone,
you can count on someone else.
Two women started it:
my sister Maritsa, and I.
My sister is two years younger than me.
But she holds a thousand more
years of learning.
Together and with many fellow farmers
we started giving workshops
and follow up on many families.
Some people understand easy, get excited,
there are tears of happiness.
Others have a harder time,
they’re afraid of losing,
beyond the fact that they’re used
to always lose, they don’t trust.
We had that challenge as women.
In the fields, those who drive
change are women.
But they’re not represented.
Because it’s naturalized that
it’s men who decide what to plant,
what to buy, who handle the money,
and drive the vehicle.
And women are
in the kitchen with the children.
But now they’re listening to us.
Anyway, it is still hard to get women
to come and train.
They just sometimes need
that you tell them “you can, too”.
During quarantine, we also had
to learn to drive,
because there was no transportation.
And it was very necessary to go out.
We can no longer wait
for others to drive us.
We arrived in 2010,
and in 2018 we were able to come back
to our little town in Bolivia.
There, the production is heading
the same direction as here.
I remember going with my mom
to the market,
we would buy seeds from an old lady,
who was surrounded by
many bags of awayo
filled with varieties of seeds
of all the colors you can imagine.
Now, the same old lady was there
but this time surrounded by cans,
the same cans we buy here,
she no longer produces seeds,
she now buys and resells.
This hurts the wisdom
our grandparents left us.
The farmers are forgetting
how to produce.
Agroecology, in fact,
doesn’t teach anything new.
The preparations we teach them to do
they’ve known how to do long before.
Some remember with much happiness
and shine in the eyes
the flowers near the fruit trees
and how plants that have nice smells
were also the remedy
for their ailments.
My 96-year-old grandfather
who received me,
told me very softly, in Quechua,
“You come from the fields
and that’s your story,
your roots are here on the land,
and you should always come back
to where you came from
because it reminds you who you are.
When you come back,
I’ll always be waiting for you.”
When we begin a workshop
we all greet in Quechua.
Imaynalla kachkankichik? How are you?
Everyone laughs because
they know where they come from.
We start by talking about the Pachamama,
our Mother Earth.
August 1st is her day off.
We bring her offerings and in return
we ask for abundance.
Now that ritual had gotten commercial.
They sell you a pack with everything
you have to offer the earth.
It even comes with a dollar bill,
symbolizing asking for money.
We ask Mother Earth a lot,
but if we finish the ritual
and we go back to our plots
and fumigate with poisons,
we’re not giving back anything.
But how can we go back to natural?
Not the business of natural.
The planet is very rich,
but we overexploited it.
We eliminate their forests,
we banish their guardians,
and with the logic of creating riches
we impoverish the planet.
The damage we do to the earth,
we do it ourselves
and those coming after us.
We farmers don’t own the lands.
We keep renting abandoned fields,
we improve them,
but temporary contracts
don’t let us build.
We live in precarious constructions
and every few years we have to move
and start all over again.
It’s a big business for everyone,
but the producer.
When you leave the improved field,
it’s lotted and the city advances.
We farmers produce a lot of value
but we’re unprotected.
We used to sell from the truck,
that means that the one
who loads the truck
decides the price of production.
Now we meet in assembly and we agree
on a cost that lasts six months.
So we know before we sow
how much we’re going to earn.
We don’t get in debt anymore.
Now we have biofactories
for our own bioinputs.
We have a store for the producers
who can’t do it on their own.
We built our own plant production space,
and we’re starting to produce
our own seed.
We also created our
own trading company
to avoid intermediaries.
We are becoming more sovereign
and independent.
At first we thought we weren’t going
to be able to sell our production.
But no, there’s a lot of demand
from people who want to eat healthy.
We can’t keep up.
What we produce doesn’t meet
the demand we have.
We are around 17,000 families
in the whole UTT.
Not all of us do agroecology
but we fight every day
to bring in more technicians
and more families to produce.
This is the reality of all
the ones who produce food.
We want to let you know how we live,
let our voices be heard,
and not be afraid
of being discriminated for being natives,
and that you see us
proud to be producers.
Let it also be known that we women
have a very important role
when it comes to deciding what we bring
to our family’s table.
You can be produce taking care of
the producer’s health,
the health of the food,
the health of the earth,
and the health of people
who consume it at a fair price.
Because healthy food
it’s a right for everyone,
not just for the ones who can afford it.
We already know this,
now we must not forget it.