Well, what to say. It has been quite a change in...everything...since I last posted about my wonderful vacation. There was another policeman killed by the guerrilla in the area near the community this month, and three days later, on July 13th, another community Humanitarian Zone leader named Dairo Torres was taken off a public tranport vehicle and killed by paramilitaries. Since then there has been a high level of paramilitary activity reported in the area. There have also been police checkpoints right outside the community, and some hard interactions with the police around the rights of the community. In the meantime, the investigation into the robbery has stalled. I am headed out there now for a couple weeks, and then will return to the US for a quick visit to spend time with my childhood best friend's new baby and drop in on my family.
There continues to be interesting and stimulating work to do here in Bogotá, but I am ready to be back in the community for a while. City life everywhere is a grind, I think, and I am longing to be outside without so much pollution and to sleep and rise with the sun, rather than the beeping of cell phones and computer alerts.
I finally wrote up the piece I did about my accompaniment of the ACA, the Antioquia Peasants Association, which I will paste part of here. Hope you are all well - send some postive energy/prayers Colombia's way if you're so inclined...
Constructing a Peasant Movement: How to grow worms to make healthy soil
By Me, 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.
“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.
[To read the rest of Janice’s letter from the field, click here.]
