“As environmentalists and advocates of indigenous cultural autonomy, the grassroots agroecology movement should be at the forefront of our movement.”

Across Latin America, the onset of colonialism in the early 16th century introduced the one dimensional logic of short term profit seeking to the realm of agriculture. 

The manifestation of this purely extractive logic was the monocrop plantation. The monoculture introduced the reduction of complex intertwined ecological systems to the production of a singular crop. Historically this has brought vast ecological consequences to environments across various biomes in Latin America. A basic explanation of agroecology is the application of ecological principles to agriculture, entailing the reversal of the colonial logic of monoculture. Influenced by indigenous ecological knowledge, and key to restoring degraded ecosystems, agricultural economic justice, and mitigating the effects of climate change, the agroecological movement should be recognized and widely promoted within environmentalist spaces.

Agroecology isn’t just the science of the ecology of agricultural systems, it is also a broad based and decentralized global social movement with deep roots across indigenous and folk communities in Latin America. This socio-political movement has been associated with calls for agrarian reform and a ‘life’ project in opposition to ecologically and socially catastrophic consequences of the monoculture model produced by agribusiness. These movements are global in scope, exemplified by La Via Campesina, which is an international agroecological movement comprised of “millions of peasants, landless workers, indigenous people, pastoralists, fishers, migrant farmworkers, small and medium-size farmers, rural women, and peasant youth from around the world.” To understand how this movement for agricultural justice and ecological reclamation has evolved in a bioregional context, it is important to introduce how this movement is gaining traction in the cool, hilly, highland forest cover ecosystems of Central America’s coffee growing region. 

Coffee beans peeled, dry and roasted.

First it is important to outline a short history. The coffee export business boomed in Central America through the mid to late 19th century, which precipitated huge conversions of forested hill areas to make new coffee plantations to supply for mostly British and American markets. The accumulation of new land by processes of dispossession exacerbated ecological degradation not only through the conversion of forest cover to monoculture, but also the displacement of indigenous populations and subsistence peasantry into new areas of forest. This resulted in new ecological pressures driven by subsistence activity that resulted in “widespread deforestation and soil erosion.” More recently, starting in 2012, severe crop losses have occurred due to an outbreak of coffee leaf rust disease. The biodiversity loss inherent to monoculture methods make such outbreaks far more likely. 

To reverse this degradation and develop resilience to climate change, agroecological methods have been growing alongside indigenous led social movements in these coffee growing areas. Empirical evidence from across these regions have suggested that when implemented in smallholder coffee “agroecosystems”, these methods lead to increased nutrient use efficiency, minimization of erosion, maximization of coffee yields, better soil moisture retention and other positive indicators. 

“Climate change also poses major threats to the future viability of industry in the region. An estimated 40% or more of coffee growing areas in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and El Salvador will be adversely affected in the absence of any adaptation measures. To counteract these potentially devastating climate induced issues, agroecology methods inspired by traditional indigenous knowledge are essential.”

A primary example of this from within the region is playing out in Guatemala. Agroecology has been pursued in coffee growing territories in recent decades alongside the implementation of indigenous Maya-Achi knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is increasingly recognized as crucial to agricultural development, and composes part of a combined approach to agroecology that fuses “broad but shallow” ecological science approaches with “deep but narrow” traditional indigenous knowledge. Local farmers use native plant species to identify soil health, which according to local Achí practitioners increases through the addition of organic material, and declines with the use of agrochemicals.

Centuries of violence against indigenous communities across Central America have contributed to a loss of “local knowledge, crop varieties, beliefs and traditional food systems,” coinciding with the dominance of monoculture in the coffee business. Therefore agroecological initiatives that re-center these forms of indigenous knowledge and practice can be both ecologically and culturally transformative in bioregional contexts. As a global movement, agroecology has the potential to advance food sovereignty, provide a bulwark against climate change, and foster economically just agricultural reform. As environmentalists and advocates of indigenous cultural autonomy, the grassroots agroecology movement should be at the forefront of our movement.

Maya Achi farmers, Groundswell International

Sources:

“La Via Campesina” https://viacampesina.org/en/international-peasants-voice/

 Myers, Norman, and Richard Tucker. “Deforestation in Central America: Spanish Legacy and North American Consumers,” Environmental Review, 1987, 60.

Tucker, Richard P. Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 181.

 Kaitlyn Morris et al.,“Agroecology and Climate Change Resilience in Smallholder Coffee Agroecosystems of Central America,” 2016, 3.

 Kaitlyn Morris et al., 4-5.

Nathan Einbinder, Helda Morales, Mateo Mier y Terán Giménez Cacho, Bruce G Ferguson, Miriam Aldasoro, and Ronald Nigh. “Agroecology from the Ground up: A Critical Analysis of Sustainable Soil Management in the Highlands of Guatemala.” Agriculture and Human Values, 2022, 980.

 Einbinder et al., 980.