Zaragoza Tilantongo, Oaxaca- Señora Epifania Palacios and Rosario Santiago Santos

Rosario

Rosario Santiago Santos is a pretty goat herder and campesina and the young, gregarious granddaughter of Epifania Palacios, a village cook in the mountain pueblo of Zaragoza Tilantongo.  We arrived at their brick home about sunset after a breathtaking ride up the side of a mountain on a one lane road with a sheer drop off both sides, praying all the while we wouldn’t meet a car coming down in the opposite direction! After that little surge of adrenaline, I was happy to get out of the driver’s seat and walk down the pine tree lined path to their house, stretch my legs and slow down my beating heart!

Epifania

As we arrived, they were just finishing the Mole Amarillo de Frijol Blanco and Nopales for the annual Feria de la Milpa to be held the following day. The kitchen was the standard Mixtec country kitchen in a separate building with a stone table set up to build a fire on, with a molded adobe ring to hold the flat unglazed disk called the comal. Next to that was her metate, where she massaged the dough and made little thick masa cakes that were pressed into large very thin tortillas on a big iron press.  Rosario amused us with stories while she made countless fresh tortillas on the comal. 

Nearby were two more molded rings to rest the round ollas where she had cooked beans, and the nixtamal, which is dried corn boiled in water and calcium oxide (cal) to soften. Lots of firewood was stacked in a corner. The large cazuela they were stirring held enough mole to serve small bowls to about 200 people. True to tradition, the people in the Mixteca are very generous and they insisted on giving us some to try. It was delicious, very filling with the beans and cactus pieces immersed in a tasty mole sauce bursting with the flavor of chile guajillos, cooked in combination with corn masa and herbs, and ever so picante! The belief in their household is that if the food isn’t “hot” or picante, it can make you ill! 

It is said that this dish or some rendition of this recipe is the traditional food to make when the family and others in the community come to plant corn.  Very appropriate to make for the Feria de la Milpa, where everyone in CEDICAM gathers to exchange seeds of corn, beans and squash! 

  MOLE AMARILLO DE FRIJOL BLANCO Y NOPALES

WHITE BEAN AND CACTUS YELLOW MOLE

YIELDS 12 - 14

INGREDIENTS

For the beans:

I pound white beans

½ medium white onion, finely chopped

5 cloves garlic, finely chopped

3 hierba santa leaves, torn into big pieces

2 teaspoons sea salt

1 pound nopales, grilled, then cut into pieces

  MOLE AMARILLO DE FRIJOL BLANCO Y NOPALES p2

For the mole:

1 head garlic, peeled

1 white onion, in thick slices to grill

3-4 ounces chile guajillo, depending on how “hot” you want it

2 tablespoons Oaxacan oregano, or marjoram, dried

2 teaspoons cumin seed

3 whole allspice berries

6 oz.  prepared masa OR  (2/3 C. masa harina mixed with 1/3  C + 2 TBS water)

 sea salt, to taste

METHOD

For the beans:

In a olla or clay pot with a lid, heat 3 quarts of water to boil.  Add onion and garlic and cook 15 minutes. Add the beans, lower the heat and cook 45 minutes or until almost soft.  Add the hierba (hoja) santa leaves and 2 teaspoons sea salt, continue cooking five minutes and add the nopales.  Remove from heat. 

For the mole:

On a comal, griddle or dry frying pan, roast the garlic and onion until translucent.  In a small pot heat 1 quart of water to boil.  Pour over the chiles and soak for 15 minutes, or until soft.

With tongs, remove chiles from soaking water and grind in the blender with, the roasted onion and garlic, oregano, cumin, and allspice until very smooth. Place puree in a food mill and strain.

Add the puree to the bean mixture and heat through about 10 minutes.

Place the masa in a blender with one cup of water and blend until smooth.  Add this mixture to the mole and cook for 15 minutes more.  Add salt to taste and serve with limes.

©Susana Trilling SOMH Sept.2011 Oaxaca
Photography @ Judith Cooper Haden All Rights Reserved

 

 

IF 'FRANKENFOODS' ARE SO GOOD FOR US, LET'S LABEL THEM!

I admit it. I’m confused. It was just announced that, following in the footsteps of Germany, Hungary, Greece, Luxembourg, Austria and Bulgaria, food-friendly France became the latest member of the European nations to prohibit the planting of U.S. giant Monsanto’s Genetically Modified (GMO) seeds.  Huh? And it seems that Russia, Brazil, China, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand all require labels for GM foods. And Japan, Ireland, and Egypt have even decided to ban all GMO foods. What?  Why is this not front page news?

Genetically Modified Organisms simply refers to the manipulation of DNA by humans to change the essential makeup of plants and animals. Frankenfoods is the affectionate term used to describe GMO crops. While the initial lofty goals might have been increased production in hungry nations, or having weed killer resistant seeds (Monsanto’s Roundup) in the lazy ones, enough time has passed since their introduction that we now have creditable research showing that the side effects of Monsanto’s GMO strategy are among the most deadly and dangerous present threats to our world.

Monsanto has put at risk the very seed diversity of our planet by spreading GMO contaminated pollen in the centers of origin of critical food crops, and has patented the very commons of humanity, i.e. the seeds themselves. The very existence of organic farming in the U.S. has been threatened through widespread, uncontrollable airborne GM contamination. Our soil and water resources are contaminated with highly toxic glyphosate herbicide through Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready GMO seed system.  There are high abortion rates and low fertility in cattle (and horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry) that have been traced to GM Roundup Ready soy in animal feed. And let’s not forget soy-consuming humans. Additionally the existence of the Monarch butterfly in the U.S. is endangered by the promotion of large increases in the use of their herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) that has completely eliminated the milkweed plant in many states upon which the butterflies depend for reproduction and food. And, what about our bees?? And the super weeds and Bt resistant insects that are inadvertently created with the over application of herbicides and the Bt toxin that result from the application of these GMO systems.

Non-GMO Corn, OAXACA, Mexico

The economic viability of the entire U.S. agricultural system is endangered by vigorous distribution of inadequately tested GMO species that are being rejected right and left by key international markets. Monsanto has intimidated U.S. farmers with lawsuits that make it too economically risky for farmers to save and improve their own seeds from one year to the next. Attorneys for Monsanto have pushed for risky farmer contract arrangements that are causing hopeless indebtedness, and even causing high rates of suicides among farmers in some developing countries when GMO’s don’t produce as advertised in new environments.  Imagine, if you can, the millions of small farmers around the world who won’t be able to save seeds to feed their families because of vigorous enforcement of GMO patents, or even afford to buy Monsanto seeds at four times the price, these farmers that live on $2 a day or less.

Testing for these relationships between skyrocketing food allergy and chronic disease rates has become nearly impossible, and the consumption of foods containing GMO´s is also impossible to track due to the ferocious lobbying against GMO labeling on foods. This serves to keep us in the dark about the entire issue.  In 2009 the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on physicians to educate their patients to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when. GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. The Institute for Responsible Technology recently discussed the only published human feeding study, which revealed what may be the most dangerous problem of all from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy or corn transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. More simply put, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives. GM foods just might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans, where 80 percent of our immune system resides.  And then?

Beautiful Native, Heritage Corn, Nochixtlan, OAX., MX

Organic growing techniques can mitigate global warming, and it’s now clear that organic farming can benefit anyone, on any continent. A recent report of the UN Human Rights Commission on the right to food estimates that we can double food production in 10 years with agro-ecological farming techniques, in spite of Monsanto’s major myth that organic-farming methods can’t produce enough food to feed the world.

 But unless you grow your own food, or eat 100% organic, you are consuming these scientifically modified foods almost daily as they are not labeled here. YET. Genetically modified crops now include sweet corn, peppers, squash and zucchini, potatoes, rice, sugar cane, sugar beets, rapeseed (for canola oil), flax, chicory, peas and papaya. About 25% of the milk in the United States comes from cows injected with a GM hormone, honey comes from bees buzzing in GM fields. The Department of Agriculture says that in 2010, as much as 86 percent of corn, up to 90 percent of all soybeans and nearly 93 percent of cotton were GM varieties!!! Which means that most of our store-bought tortillas are riddled with it…. (GM pigs and salmon are next, folks……no joke.)

What to do? Experts agree that about our only power at this point against this giant corporation (that also brought us Agent Orange, DDT, PCB’s and dioxins) is to force the labeling of GMO foods, and then to not purchase them. We need to support our local growers who refuse to use genetically modified seeds and GM drugs on their livestock.  We need to ban Roundup, NOT use it to clean our precious acequias. We can help support California (and Connecticut) organizers who are gathering signatures for the historic 2012 California Right2Know/Label GMOs ballot initiative for voter approval this fall. As goes California, so goes the nation.  If GMOs ultimately fail, shareholders in Monsanto, (and other biotech companies such as Bayer and Syngenta) will see their investments drop like a lead balloon. So plan ahead -- pull out of funds which invest in Monsanto. If you are a gardener, save your seeds. Do our own research. Oh yeah, and write op-ed pieces to your local paper….and hope they get published.

If all the countries in the world, our own included, slam the door shut on GMO’s before it’s too late, we might have a chance of gaining back control of the future of our seeds, our food, our health and our planet.   Wake up, people!

© Judith Cooper Haden

Santa Fe, NM

judithhaden@yahoo.com
All Photos © Judith Haden Photography.com

MONSANTO APPROACHES IN TILANTONGO!!

     MONSANTO  APPROACHES, CAMPESINOS UNITE!

April  2012

Dear Friends and Family,

The early “cajete” (ca-háy-tay) corn, planted when the soil is still dry here in the Mixteca Alta, has sprouted in the field below the house along with the beans and squash that accompany it in the milpa. The technique of planting these and other companion plants together to make up the “milpa” forms an ingeniously productive and sustainable complex botanical community. Mutual aid, harmony, and equilibrium hold this community of plants together and make the whole more productive than when planted separately. And together they form a rich, shady environment in which dozens of varieties of wild edible and medicinal plants find the unique conditions for their own growth.

In spite of the prejudices of the occidental worldview which proposes that without competition there is no production, in the milpa we see that the strategy of trying to make one species compete to eliminate all potential competitors (what is called a monoculture in modern agriculture) is not more productive.

Today it is becoming evident that in human communities as well the fierce competitiveness of the occidental vision is, in the end, much more destructive than productive.

Last week 300 campesino men and women from across Oaxaca met in the beautiful ethno-botanical gardens of Oaxaca City to strategize about promoting and defending the incredibly rich biodiversity of native corn varieties in this, the center or origin of corn. More than 36 of the original 56-60 land races of native corn are still planted here in the mountains of Oaxaca, along with hundreds of varieties of each race, each adapted to the challenges of the growing conditions of its specific region. With this incredible biodiversity and these rich genetic resistances we hold the future of corn on the planet in our hands.

Yet, in addition to developing plans to promote the planting and improvement of native seeds and to strengthen the custom of planting in milpa in Oaxacan communities, these 300 farmers needed also a defense plan. Under the “influence” of large international corporations such as Monsanto, the Mexican government has authorized the very risky business of planting genetically modified corn in this world center of origin. The vision of competitiveness that reigns in the dominant cultures today threatens to destroy access to the world’s sources of corn genetic diversity through contamination and patenting of native varieties for profit. Three hundred campesinos this day decided they will fight!

But it is dangerous to fight. Three weeks ago Bernardo Vasquez, who worked with us on strategies for nonviolent social change, was killed for his opposition to a Canadian gold mining operation that is polluting the waters of his community. Two weeks before that Betina, with whom we have also worked to develop effective strategies to protect indigenous communal lands, was arrested on trumped up charges.  Her opposition to massive private wind farms that are taking over productive campesino lands on false pretenses, with the cooperation of the federal government, threatened “progress”.  After all, the project is hailed by foreign environmental groups and receives UN carbon credit payments.

Privately controlled hydroelectric projects in Oaxaca are inundating thousands of acres of indigenous lands and of native biodiversity, against international laws that protect indigenous territories. Indigenous communities are fighting back, while the projects primarily designed to export electricity for private profit, ironically, receive carbon sequestration credits.

In a recent interview well known scientist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute suggested that the energy needs of the Global North can easily be met by new technological efficiencies and cheap, clean renewables in a process of conversion from fossil fuel use led by business for profit. Neither here nor elsewhere in the Global South do we have the luxury of such faith in the private corporation and the innocuous character of competitive greed and business for profit.

It no doubt took many years of careful observation and experimentation for the great, great grandparents of the Mixtec people to understand and construct the harmonious and productive community of the milpa. It also seems they carefully studied how to create harmonious and productive human communities where men and women complemented one another in producing the material, social and spiritual necessities of everyone. Some of their wisdom has survived today in our villages’ communitarian organization, which help us produce for the common good: the tequio, gueza, cargos, and community assemblies.

Like these indigenous ancestors, the human family of today will have to learn how to form the complex communities of complementarity, harmony and balanced production that we will need to overcome the crises we face today. Neither business for profit nor governments beholden to big money will do it.


©Phil and Kathy Dahl-Bredine, Judith Cooper Haden Photography

"CAJETE," The Milpa's Ancient Ecological Native Wonder

 In the villages of the Mixteca Alta there is a special kind of native corn that should give pause to the sometimes overweening pride of our modern scientific era and to its scorn for the ignorance of previous “less scientific” ages. It is commonly called “cajete” from the form in which it is planted in small indentations or “cajetes” in the dry fields. It is a very ancient corn in a land whose indigenous scientists invented corn from a parent plant called “teocintle” around 10,000 years ago. That feat alone, which accomplished an unequaled botanical leap from a wild plant with no cob or husk to “modern” corn with no apparent intermediary species, should humble our scientific hubris.

 But the corn called cajete in addition does things that the most technically sophisticated hybrid or GM corn cannot repeat. Planted in the long dry season in the Mixteca Alta by digging with a traditional tool called a coa until residual moisture from the previous year’s rainy season is uncovered it germinates and grows up to 4 months without rain. Some of the cajete varieties have long above ground roots that have a kind of mucus on them that, university investigators here believe has the capacity to fix atmospheric nitrogen into soils and sustain yearly crops of cajete without diminishing soil fertility. Only leguminous plants are supposed to possess such capabilities.

 The cajete system is a sophisticated ecological and socio-economic invention as well. The checkerboard field of small, box-like indentations in which the corn is planted serves to collect scarce rainfall and helps prevent soil erosion. Since planting cajete is more labor intensive than traditional planting systems it is supported by and in turn supports a community socio-economic system based on mutual aid called gueza. I help my neighbors plant and they help me. And so on an early February morning one can see a line of 6 to 8 people with tall coas moving across a field in a synchronized planting dance.

In each indentation planters drop 3 to 4 seeds of corn, a native bean seed and the seed for native squash. By June the cajete Milpa is complete with its complementary planted varieties and the spontaneous edible plants called quelites that will grow between the rows. A full food system for both Mixtec families and native soils.


© Phil Dahl-Bredine
© Photographs Judith Cooper Haden

Francisca's Traditional Mixtec Kitchen in Hidalgo Jaltepec

Traditional kitchens in the Mixteca are seductive. They have no relationship with what we are used to in the United States.  Inside, they are smoky, dark and wonderful. Cleanly dampened and swept dirt floors. No windows but light manages to creep in between the bamboo-like stick walls, and in the small space between the tin or thatched ceiling and the walls.  If outside, they are usually covered and open to the air.  The smells of freshly made masa from corn grown just outside the door being toasted into a tortilla on a huge clay comal is an unforgettable aroma.  And once you taste a real tortilla...well, it's hard to see the relationship between that, and what we are served here at home.

Francisca Garcia Ferrer

Francisca, her daughter Sylvia and her husband Apolonio have become great friends during our project. They have shared much of their time and knowledge with us, and we are most grateful. Francisca knows all her traditional recipes by touch and smell, and stopping her in mid-recipe to measure how much onion, now many grams of masa dough -- how big was that handfull of oregano? -- interrupted her stride. The daughters and daughters-in-law are all present to help cook for festivals or large family gatherings -- they prepared 150 tamales for the Dia de la Candelaria/Candlemas Celebration -- and I was very aware of watching the unwritten passing of the recipes down through the generations. Francisca would gently chide if the appropriate method or quantity wasn't quite right. All with good cheer, laughter and an excellent repast at the end.

The ceramic pitchers are hung on the walls for safe keeping, ready to serve atole (a hot, thick sweetened corn or wheat drink) or the famous regional hot chocolate.

The huge clay comal is the heart of the kitchen, and rightly so, as corn has been their sustenance for thousands of years....it's earthy, round seasoned presence is like a beloved  member of the family. The corn grinder in this kitchen is a manual one; some more 'modern' kitchens have a new electric or propane operated free standing machine that is very noisy, but very efficient for feeding large numbers of people.  Some of the women in these small towns make 5-6 dozen tortillas (corn, wheat, and a mixture of each)  to sell at their local markets to earn an extra $25-35 dollars a week, and the new device is much appreciate

Manual corn grinder

Most houses we visited had the traditional kitchens with wood-burning stoves for  tortillas, tamales, and larger quantity preparations. Some can afford a newer more modern kitchen, usually built in stifling  hot little concrete block additions with a propane stove for small family breakfasts, reheating tortillas and tamales, and easily ready to offer guests a quick cup of coffee. Some have refrigerators, like Francisca and Apolonio. Even though at times the smoke kitchens are difficult to spend time in, that's our preference. There is ventilation on most kitchens, but it is usually insufficient for the amount of smoke produced, and the older women are start to develop eye disease from constant and lengthy daily exposure.

Many times dogs are only fed tortillas, and they learn to wait patiently outside the kitchen door for their portion. Dogs are not pets the way they are for us, nor cats; they have practical jobs assigned to them -- night watchman,
rodent police, garbage collector -- and are actually bought and sold, cats fetch 30-40 pesos -- $2.50-4$!  They are not attributed with feelings or needs; it takes a while to get used to the treatment of these domestic creatures. (I remember receiving a letter from  home while while in the Peace Corps in El Salvador; my Dad knew our beloved beagle was really sick when he refused a large portion of roast beef....I read this after coming back from the wake of a baby who died in essence from dehydration and starvation..... we don't know how lucky we have it.)

This was the first picture I took at the very beginning of this project, over a year ago. We all felt it had special significance.....and still do!

©Photographs Judith Cooper Haden

Climate Change, Erosion and the Bolivian Rights of Mother Earth

         June, 2010

It is June and indigenous campesinos from our village and other surrounding communities are still waiting for the rains to come so they can plant what will serve as their food for the year. A few more weeks without rain, and it will be too late for crops to mature before the fall frosts. Evidently, those who would deny the reality of climate change haven’t been watching the skies and depending on ever more unreliable rains for their daily bread, as have our neighbors. We are just back from meetings with indigenous leaders, and religious leaders in Bolivia, and campesinos there are also watching frightening changes as the glaciers on which they depend for irrigation and water for living, grow ever smaller on the jagged peaks of the Andes.

How and why is this happening? And who is responsible?

When you look at the eroded lands that the indigenous organization with which we work is struggling to re-make, and also at the treeless, deforested slopes of the Andes, you would have to conclude that indigenous peoples played a part in the destruction. That’s why in front of CEDICAM´s small new museum of Mixtec Campesino agriculture and biodiversity called “The Casa de la Milpa”, there is a sign next to the remains of a large stone and molten earth oven. The sign reads:   “Caution, campesino men and women. Before you enter this museum, think deeply. This oven was used to burn rocks to make lime for churches and colonial buildings. It burned trees day and night for three days at a time to produce 500 kilos of lime. With technology like this our ancestors, under the influence of foreign interests, burned the forests of our communities leaving us a sterile and eroded land. Let us build a sustainable way of life based on the wisdom of our communities and create a healthy abundance in harmony with the Mother Earth for the future of the Mixteca Alta.”   It took ten of us, men and women, to unearth and transport the oven to the museum site as a stark but essential reminder of the errors of the past.

photographer unknkown

      

The Conference of the Peoples of the World on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, took place last month in Bolivia with strong indigenous participation. They concluded that the industrialized countries of the global North bear the majority of the responsibility for the changing climate. They point out that we all share one great global ring of atmosphere which has a set capacity to safely recycle and absorb gases such as CO2. The North has so over-exploited this capacity of the atmosphere that it has drastically encroached on the rights of others to a clean and safe atmosphere, causing changes that are disturbing rain patterns and melting glaciers in the global South. This so threatens the lives of the poor of the South that the conference is demanding the North recognize and pay an environmental debt for its damage to the global atmosphere on which we all depend.

Drawing from the millennia-old values of the indigenous peoples here in the Mixteca of Mexico and across the Americas, the conference concluded:

“To confront climate change we need to recognize our Mother Earth as the source of life and forge a new system based on the principles of:

1.  Harmony and equilibrium among and with everything

2.  Complementarity, solidarity and equality

3.  Common well-being and satisfaction of fundamental necessities of all in harmony with the Mother Earth

4.  Respect for the rights of Mother Earth and for  human rights                                            

5.  Recognition of the value of the human being for what he/she is and not for what she/he possesses

6.  Elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism, and interventionism.

7.  Peace among the peoples of the world and with the Mother Earth.”

Charles Mann, in his book “1491”, points out the dramatic influence that the original indigenous peoples of North America had on U.S. and European history through providing living examples of men and women who believed in and demanded personal liberty. We learned about personal liberty and constructed constitutions to embody these new concepts. But we perhaps forgot about the other aspects of indigenous life: communal responsibility, complementarity, mutual aid, and respect for the Mother Earth. Our experience here in the indigenous village of Yucuyoco suggest to us that perhaps now is the time for us to correct this oversight.


Photographs  ©Judith Cooper Haden unless otherwise noted.

The Tradition of 'Gueza,' or Traditional Mutual Sharing; The Feria de la Milpa

        April, 2010

This morning some of the neighbors came down with their coas (see the picture) to help plant the early corn called cajete. It is planted in the dry season and can grow months without rain. Last year our cajete grew 14 feet tall!

The neighbors came as part of a traditional mutual sharing called gueza. “Planting cajete always used to be pure gueza. We would plant at one family’s house and then all go to another’s until everyone had planted”, Tio Juan explained. The morning started cool and pleasant, but as the clouds cleared the sun became hot. As I planted the sweat ran down my face, and I wondered to myself how I could explain why laboring this way with ancient seeds and planting techniques was not a romantic game, an escape from the complex issues that the world faces.

But as I straightened up and saw the others planting ahead of me in the furrows above, it struck me that this complex world faces two fundamental and critical challenges. One is to remold the lifestyle of the peoples of the global North to something that matches the ability of the planet to sustain us. The second is to work with the majority of humanity, which lives in the rural global South, to create economically healthy farming communities, where the world’s food needs can be met and where there is no longer the need to emigrate to unsustainable urban centers.

We were working on both of those challenges in the field this morning. Community cooperation must replace exaggerated egoism and individualism in the North while seeking ecologically sound ways of meeting basic needs. And farming communities in the South must find ways to use their ancestral knowledge and the great agricultural biodiversity that they have created and which they preserve for the human family, to build economically sound villages and feed surrounding populations.

It is because of this second challenge that over 350 indigenous campesino men, women and children gathered in our nearby district center last week to celebrate the first annual Indigenous Campesino Fair and the inauguration of the Casa de la Milpa Sostenible, House of the Sustainable Milpa, a small museum featuring indigenous knowledge and biodiversity as a basis for a sustainable future. 

Our Niño a Niño group, called Ñuú Xekuechi (“Community of Children” in the indigenous Mixtec language) from the village of La Providencia participated, with  20 children and teenagers attending the event, having obtained special permits to be absent from school.  The Campesino (family farmer) Fair was set up in the central square of the town of Nochixtlán, with tables and booths around the entire area, each displaying the myriad varieties and colors of native corns – in reds, blues, blacks and purples, various shades of yellow, and white ---- corn varieties deriving from ancestors going back to centuries before Christ: corns which carry in their genes the toughness of drought resistance, adaptability to high and low altitudes, those which survive extremes of temperature or rain fall… all of which have been carefully improved by indigenous farmers to adapt as needed to local conditions.  There were also beans in many colors and sizes, various types of squash seeds, local herbs, as well as local types of medicinal plants and seeds.


The House of the Milpa museum tells the story of the form of planting developed uniquely in Mesoamerica that one expert has called “perhaps one of the most successful inventions of humankind.” Planting corn, beans, squash, amaranth, tomatillo, together in the same plot and allowing the wild edible plants to grow among them yields high production of one of the healthiest diets on the planet and a soil treatment and weed and insect control which have made it sustainable for millennia. In some areas here the current version of the milpa has been improved with careful seed selection to the point that it has tripled production. The math is interesting: 60-70% of the world’s food is still produced by small farmers. Industrial agriculture, which accounts for the remaining production, can only expect a few percentage points of improvement in the future. Doubling or tripling the production of the 60-70% of small farmers has much greater potential for feeding the world than Archer Daniels Midland and its corporate cohorts.

All Photographs © Judith Cooper Haden

CORN WALKING IN THE MIXTECA -- Let's Reconsider 'Doing Things Big!"

January, 2010

Dear friends and family,

Last night as we came home from Oaxaca we rounded a curve and saw in the semi-darkness a round hulk of corn stalks a good 10 feet wide moving down the opposite lane toward us. “Corn walking” we call this common phenomenon these days when all of our campesino neighbors are harvesting their crops. For the huge bundle of upright corn stalks usually hides all but the small hooves of the sturdy burro that is silently propelling the bundle toward home from under the stalks. It reminded us of what we have over and over again been forced by our neighbors to recognize in our time in the village of Yucuyoco: life here challenges all of our Northern preconceptions and preferred systems of providing the necessities of life. It especially challenges our myths about the efficiency of “doing things big”.

© Phil Dahl-Bredine

The burro carries as much corn as a well packed pick up truck. But you will all laugh at us if we suggest it is a more efficient way to transport farm produce. Yet U.S. farmers will not laugh so loud when they hear that investment in the burro was $50 and that our farmer friends here are not in debt to the banks, they are not threatened with losing their land to foreclosure, and there are no farmer suicides that so often follow these foreclosures in the U.S. And it may be cause for thought that recent studies have shown that, although farmers here have lower yields per acre when they mono crop corn, the total food produced on small parcels that combine the polycultures of the traditional milpa system and small livestock is often higher than on the “modern” agribusiness farms.

Ah, but the burro and other less mechanized methods of production are so slow! Yet, in this time in which we are bumping up against the ecological limits of the planet and the social limits of the increasing gap between rich and poor, it is time to begin to dispel the myths about the importance of speed and bigness.

Both speed and bigness cost! Both produce contamination, concentration of wealth, unemployment, unsustainable resource use, and ill health. All of these are costs we cannot afford at this our time to be here on planet Earth. The ever increasing number of enterprises that have come to be “too big to fail” want us to believe that speed and bigness are essential to competitiveness and cheaper consumer goods. But this is because they wish to continue to externalize the above mentioned costs in all of our production systems, from food production to manufacturing, onto government, service organizations, and the “modern” family.

Oh, they will accuse us of being Luddites, romantics, crackpots! But the basic systems on which we depend in the North no longer work. We must question them at the deepest level. Speed and large size are two of the first entities that we need to strip from the myths that surround them.

Of course what the people of Yucuyoco teach us doesn’t necessarily mean all of us should return to burros or other extremely simple technologies (although in the face of scarce petroleum caused by the U.S. blockade, Cuba has returned to animal traction in agriculture with significant success). But it does mean we should choose technologies consciously and intelligently and refuse to accept the myths promoted by our business and industrial leaders,  politicians, or even our scientists who are often caught in the private profit or the dominate nature mode.                                                                                            

For instance, the myth that large scale, speedy, mechanized monocultural agricultural is necessary to feed the world.

What we have learned about this here in Yucuyoco is:

1.  Small scale production works for providing food for families and neighbors. It also provides

     employment for family and neighbors.

2. Food produced this way is energy cheap. Here, and 50 years ago in the U.S., one calorie of energy input yielded 7 calories of food on the table, where our modern food system needs 10 calories of energy to get one calorie on the table. (Uncertain Peril, Claire Hope Cumming)
3. Local small scale production is environmentally cheap. Industrial agriculture creates almost 14% of the excess greenhouse gases that are affecting our climate, including nitrous oxides and CO2. In contrast, small sustainable farming that takes time to create soils rich in organic matter can sequester more excess CO2 than a forest. (“A Message for Climate Change Negotiators”, Annie Shattuck)
4. Large commercial feed lots produce vast quantities of the greenhouse gas, methane, while incorporating animal manure into soils on small scale plots actually helps soils to sequester more CO2.
5. In spite of the extreme efforts of agribusiness conglomerates to take control of the food systems of the world, small farmers still feed over 70% of the world’s people. (Who Will Feed Us?, ETC Group)

The people of Yucuyoco also challenge us to reconsider our myths about what is a good life, what is really poverty, and what place we have on this planet that they revere as the Mother Earth. What an opportunity we all have to share insights, resources, and visions across borders and across cultures to create together a sustainable planet!  

Peace and Blessings to you all,

Kathy and Phil

© Photographs Judith Cooper Haden unless otherwise noted