[Sdpg] Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands San Isidro Tilantongo Journal

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

San Isidro Tilantongo Journal
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/americas/13oaxaca.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands


SAN ISIDRO TILANTONGO, Mexico ­ Jesús León Santos 
is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant 
corn on a small plot next to his house in time 
for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.
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Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Maria Magdalena Vicente, 71, raises sheep, a 
source of cash for many of the subsistence farmers in Oaxaca’s Mixteca region.

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is 
uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of 
what mechanized agriculture churns out from the 
vast expanses of the Great Plains.

But to him, that is beside the point.

The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca 
are burdened with some of the most barren earth 
in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries 
of erosion that began even before the arrival of 
the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their 
cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some 
ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.

Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other 
farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this 
parched land, hoping to find a way for people to 
stay and work their farms instead of leaving for 
jobs in cities and in the United States.

“We migrate because we don’t think there are 
options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is 
to give options for a better life.”

Viewed against the backdrop of rising 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>food 
prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight 
to keep farmers from abandoning their land is 
much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.

As Mexico imports more corn from the United 
States, the country’s reliance on outside 
supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, 
farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s 
free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the 
last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under 
the 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/north_american_free_trade_agreement/index.html?inline=nyt-org>North 
American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups 
marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.

Mr. León and the farmers’ group he helped found, 
the Center for Integral Campesino Development of 
the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the 
past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arrest 
erosion, Cedicam has planted trees, mostly native 
ocote pines, a million in the past five years, 
raised in the group’s own nurseries.

Working communally, the villagers built stone 
walls to terrace the hillside, and they dug long 
ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of 
rainwater that dragged the soil from the 
mountains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps 
down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.

As the land has begun to produce again, Mr. León 
has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot 
where corn, climbing beans and squash grow 
together. The pre-Hispanic farming practice fixes 
nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.

Along the way, the farmers have modernized the 
ancient techniques. Mr. León has encouraged 
farmers to use natural compost as 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fertilizer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>fertilizer, 
introduced crop rotation, and improved on traditional seed selection.

Mr. León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor 
would pack down the soil too firmly.

In the eight villages in the region where Cedicam 
has worked, yields have risen about three or 
fourfold, to between 16 to 24 bushels a hectare, 
Mr. Leon said. Unlike the monocultures of 
mechanized farming, these practices help preserve genetic diversity.

Mr. León’s work is a local response to the 
dislocation created by open markets in the 
countryside. “The people here are saying that we 
have to find a way to produce our food and meet 
our basic needs and that we can do it in a way 
that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bredine, a 
Maryknoll lay workers and onetime farmer who has 
worked with Cedicam for seven years and written a book about the region.

The key to determining the project’s success, and 
that of similar projects in these highlands, will 
be if it can produce enough to sustain families 
during the bad years, said James D. Reynolds, an 
expert on desertification at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/duke_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Duke 
University who visited Cedicam last month. The 
land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that 
“the overall potential is not that high,” he said.

Over the past two decades, the Mexican government 
has steadily dismantled most support for poor 
farmers, arguing that they are inefficient. About 
two-thirds of all Mexican corn farmers, some two 
million people, are small-scale producers, 
farming less than 12 acres, but they harvest less 
than a quarter of the country’s production.

Rising demand for animal feed has spurred soaring 
imports of subsidized corn from the United 
States. Mexico now buys about 40 percent of its corn from the United States.

Increased subsistence farming is not the answer 
to the global food crisis. But people skeptical 
about the idea that free trade is the best way to 
reduce hunger point to small-scale projects like 
Cedicam’s as alternatives to industrialized 
farming, which is based on costly energy use, 
chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

“The Green Revolution displaced our local 
resources,” said Mr. León, referring to modern 
agricultural practices with hybrid crops and 
chemical fertilizers. “Our dependence on the outside, that led to our ruin.”

Mixtec farmers typically grow enough corn to feed 
their families and sell the excess in local 
markets. But the price they get has been 
distorted by subsidized American imports and the 
dominance of just a handful of large buyers. It 
does not cover the increase in the cost of 
fertilizer, which has more than doubled in the past year.

“We have to think about a different form of 
production,” said Mr. León, who won the 
prestigious Goldman Prize for grassroots 
environmentalists last month. “Conventional 
methods are not possible in a globalized market.”

Mr. León, 42, combines a hard-headed analysis of 
crop yields with a reverence for the land. “It is 
my passion to live in this place,” he said, as he 
waved at a stand of pines he had planted. “When I 
was little, it was practically impossible to hear 
the birds singing” because there were no trees, 
he said. “Now you can hear their song all day.”

But the Indians here are still so poor that many 
continue to leave. Indeed, Mr. León is the only 
one of nine siblings who farms.

Aware of that, Cedicam has started greenhouses so 
farmers can grow vegetables to sell. Most people 
still keep goats and sheep, which forage on the 
rocky hillsides. A goat will bring $45 at the 
most, money that goes to food and clothes, said 
Juventino Rosas, a farmer who lives just down the road from Mr. León.

“I want him to teach us where to find a job,” 
said Mr. Rosas’ wife, Lucía Pedro Montesinos, who 
was herding two dozen goats, her 9-month-old son strapped to her in a shawl.

And what kind of job? Mr. Rosas’ answer suggested 
that he still sees farming as a way of life, but 
not yet a living: “A water-purification plant, or maybe a clothing factory.”


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