| João had been a member of a local farm association since 1979, which then expanded to a provincial association. Finally, they merged with other farm groups in the early 1990s to form the National Union of Farmers, or UNAC, in Portuguese.
Since UNAC's official organization in 1994, João said that they've had good relations with the government. Also, that the group has an official partnership with the agriculture ministry in their work to "represent farmers at the family scale, not those big producers."
UNAC tries to meet family farmers' needs in three ways, João explained. First, by defending peasants' interests in their advocacy work. The other two ways have to do with supporting peasant farmers in being more effective in their own right. On one hand by adding to their knowledge base, and on the other by teaching them to advocate on their own behalf.
João added that their political influence was also reinforced because UNAC was a member organization of La Via Campesina. Membership in LVC, he said, gives them more contacts and more opportunities, making their movement stronger.
Farmer to Farmer, Campesino a Campesino
João said UNAC trains Mozambique's family farmers to increase production or use different methods that might be more effective. Specifically, they're trained in ecological agriculture, using organic pesticides and methods of crop cultivation that don't require synthetic chemicals. Helping them in this are farmers from other parts of Africa and also in Latin America, with whom they share experiences and ideas.
For example, João described an exchange program where a Cuban peasant farmer came for a year to share agroecological practices. Then they had two visitors from Brazil's landless peasants movement, the first staying a year and a half, the second still there, to train farmers as trainers of agroecological methods. He said that the "participative training" model that they demonstrated was as important as the content of what was taught, particularly because it got the farmers looking at how to share knowledge with each other rather than always looking to an outside expert.
What results did they get from this? João said the results had been very good.
"One of the first results was the reduction of costs," João said. The country's farmers had used to use organic agricultural methods, but had moved to chemical agriculture, which was very expensive.
The second good result they got was that "the soil is not destroyed." João said that when they were using chemical agriculture, "the soil was getting poorer and poorer, it wasn't renewing itself naturally," but now it was improving. He said there was "no difference in quantity of production," and the food quality was better, as well as better for their health.
I asked him how he could tell the crops were better with organic methods.
"The taste is better," João said without hesitation. Also, he said, and more important, everything grown with chemical fertilizer has some burden of poison with it that some research says might cause cancer. He said the agroecological methods they've gone back to using don't have that risk.
Further, João said, the seeds from plants raised with chemical fertilizer were "not easily reusable" for planting and would give a bad harvest. He said seeds from agroecologically raised crops reproduced well, had generally very strong seeds that could be used the following year for a new harvest. This also saved peasants money, he said.
Though João also said that the climate had become unpredictable lately, so that their usual agricultural calendar no longer worked and being a farmer now was "a bit like playing the lottery." He said this year, for example, he cleared the weeds in his field on the same month that he normally planted, but no rain came so he had to wait until it did and do everything all over again.
There are times, João said, when farmers have put their seeds down because the rain started and they thought it was the rainy season, but no more rains came.
(In countries where irrigation is scarce and well water might not be an option, most agriculture is rainfed. Most of the world's farming is done this way. Not getting rain when you expected to is therefore much more like a US farmer getting their water shut off by the county than it's like you or I remarking on the weather.)
Actors In Civil Society
Further, UNAC supports farmers by promoting their organization at the local level. UNAC trains them "to advocate and lobby" the government directly, as well as to "work together democratically."
Acting as a trade union for farmers, João said UNAC helps them lobby for a more comprehensive rural extension and technical assistance program. He said that they're asking the government for more frequent visits from extensionistas who also listen to and learn from farmers in a more participative way, not to have someone in a suit come and tell them what to do every once in a great while.
Another issue they organize around is access to land. In Mozambique, all the land is state-owned by law, which João said usually protects the peasants because the land can't be sold. But he said that now the government was allowing multinationals to use the land and making the peasants leave.
João said the government justified letting transnational corporations (TNCs) lease the land because they claim it created employment. But he said that often when farmers became employees, the salaries they were paid weren't enough to feed their families on.
I asked if their farms usually provided enough to feed them, now. João said that in Mozambique right now, there wasn't a problem with land, so a farmer could usually get enough to work that the family could feed themselves. But he said that when they were displaced, they would lose whatever crops they had coming and any trees that they'd planted, as well as their social network. So yes, while it was still possible to find enough land, the TNCs "keep coming and it won't go on forever."
When I asked where the corporations were coming from and what they were growing, translator Boaventura Monjane, also from Mozambique, answered quickly that the TNCs came from all over to "grow jatropha for agrofuels and sugar for ethanol," as well as eucalyptus trees. The best guess either had regarding the eucalyptus trees, which were grown mainly by Chinese companies all over Africa, was that they were for wood.
This, it turned out, had a lot to do with why João was in Copenhagen to demonstrate as part of a global civil society movement that converged on the talks held at the Bella Center.
João said he came to join together with other farmers to protest the current misuse of the planet. For example, he said, the plantations to produce ethanol for agrofuels that are "threatening the soil that was used to feed the population."
João said the arrival of the multinationals and the way they employed people made them all dependent. It's like "going backward to colonial days," João said, "the multinational is just back to that time." |
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