By Janice Gallagher

How can small, rural farmers respond to the forces of global trade and climate change?
How is a campesino (peasant) movement built amidst war and threats of displacement?
What does economic solidarity look like in rural Colombia?

These were some of the many questions that led the Antioquia Peasant Association (ACA) to organize a week-long combination conference/tour/exchange in June with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe de Antioquia, a neighboring municipality. The ACA has worked for two years with farmers from seven different communities in Eastern Antioquia, an area that has been especially hard-hit by guerrilla and paramilitary violence, to figure out how to provide for themselves and their families in the midst of war. Part of the ACA’s strategy for assisting these farmers is to bring them face to face with other farmers who have faced similar circumstances to discuss how they have moved forward. The Archdiocese of Santa Fe de Antioquia has worked with farmers for 11 years in 26 communities and during this trip the two groups explored their answers to these big questions:

How do small, rural farmers respond to the forces of global trade and climate change?
“With the FTA [Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Colombia] everything will be harder, which makes our struggle for self-sufficiency all the more important.”

In an environment where it is already incredibly difficult for small farmers to make ends meet, the ACA and Archdiocese believe that the approval of the FTA currently before Congress would make the situation of these small farmers infinitely harder. Resisting the passage of the FTA has been central political work for both the ACA and the Archdiocese. Yet, as one of the 22 campesinos on this trip said, “We can spend millions of pesos and hours protesting the policies of the state, but we also need to focus on how to feed ourselves.”

So what does this mean for them? Rather than changing which crops are planted based on the whims of the international market, the organizations believe that campesinos should produce the food they need to feed their families. Basing what to produce on the price of the crop is dangerous because prices might be high one year for, say, coffee, and by the time the crop yields fruit, the price might be half of what it was – not even enough to cover the cost that it took to produce it. Instead, the campesinos from both organizations focus on how to produce the staple crops they need to feed their families from very small plots of land. With the space left over, they produce things to sell locally. One farm we saw had every other terrace filled with onions to sell at a local market, and the other terraces held rice, beans, cilantro, tomatoes, and a cabbage-like green.

This idea that farming should benefit the farmers may seem simple, but it is a revolution in the way most agriculture has been carried out in this country and others. An integral part of this idea is that farming needs to be done sustainably. In this part of Colombia, this means growing worms in vitamin-rich food scraps to aerate the soil, using pig feces inside of a giant long and skinny plastic bag with a pipe attached to produce energy for the stove in the house, and making organic fertilizer from things already on the farm, rather than using harsh, expensive imported chemicals.

How do you build a campesino (peasant) movement?
“We are abandoned by the state, so the archdiocese is here teaching people how to be conscious of what they need.”
The ACA and Archdiocese value a model of education and organization that they call “campesino to campesino.” The idea behind this model is that the best learning takes place when peasant farmers share their knowledge directly with other peasant farmers. Who better to tell you why they chose to plant a certain type of onion over another one, or that a certain type of green is only good for pregnant pigs (it makes other pigs’ meat tough and hard) than people who have confronted almost identical circumstances, and learned through trial and error?

The classroom for answering these questions is unlike normal ones. Instead of being lectured at by “experts,” the campesinos from the ACA did a walking tour of four small farms made by people from the Archdiocese. We hiked up the sides of highways, waded through muddy fields, and I fell off a skinny dirt trail on the side of a mountain on the way to one of the farms. These farms were as small as an acre, but brimming with local food staples. The way they used the space reminded me, fondly, of how everything in my 12 foot x 15 foot apartment in Boston had its place.

People spoke of the difficult conversion to organic agriculture, the problems of genetically modified seeds (the plants they produce don’t reproduce their seed, making you dependent on whoever is producing the seed) and the many uses of banana plants (they provide good shade for surrounding plants, the enrich the soil, and they produce yummy bananas to boot).

In between these stories, people also talked about their shared histories. Almost everyone present had had to displace from their land at some point, and they talked about the when’s, why’s and how’s of having to leave, often about the loss of loved ones, and almost always about hopes and plans to return to land that had provided for them well. Many planned to use the lessons of this trip to farm tiny plots of land in the urban areas onto which they had been forced. But the most hopeful conversations I had were with those making plans for the farms where they would return.

This sharing, identifying common struggles and strategies, is ground-breaking for many. Rural peasant farmers are often isolated, farming land in places not accessible by paved roads, rarely seeing their neighbors, much less campesinos from neighboring communities. Inherent in both the ACA’s and Archdiocese’ work is breaking this isolation. The Archdiocese, for example, has ten full-time “agricultural promoters,” all of them campesinos who have come through the program and have model farms of their own. They spend their days visiting farms in the communities where the Archdiocese works and sharing what they learn with the participants. They also have organized 1,200 children into “Youth Seed-Sowers for Peace” groups, where rural children meet weekly, elect leaders, and share thoughts and learning about agriculture and living amidst conflict. This trip, an organizer from the Archdiocese explained, is another way to break rural isolation. He told me that it helps them reach the goals of “citizen participation for peace and development and organized community solidarity.”

What does economic solidarity look like in rural Colombia?
“The creation and care of the earth has a lot to do with the creation of God.”
At the end of our trip, we visited a group of women, mostly widows from the war, at a church where the Archdiocese had lent them land to grow herbs. From these herbs they made soaps, shampoos, herbal remedies, powders and even passion fruit-scented massage oil which they sell to passers-by, as well as at a bi-annual fair that the Archdiocese organizes for all local producers. As the women explained how they had made their products and other women bought from them and sat moisturizing and aroma-therapizing, they discussed a barter economy: how they could trade onions for cabbage, pigs for cows, and shampoos for mangoes - and how they could continue to share both products and learning with each other.

This is a far cry from what seemed to many to be the only option before the Archdiocese or the ACA came around: producing one crop which would inevitably exhaust the soil and selling it to the one or two exporters in the region, who would almost inevitably lower the price over time as they consolidated control over the local market.

During this trip, we all discussed God’s vision of land and farming, or “the spirituality of creation.” One of the Archdiocese foci is being pastors of the land, and this sustainable, organic method struck people as in line with God’s teaching. People reflected on a biblical passage:
“God tells us that none of us are the sole owners of this land but that we all have a right to it...We take from God’s teaching that we must not mistreat it with chemicals...and that the land is for us, not to produce for export...This is God’s land, which we must not contaminate. We must love this land as we love God.”