CETRI
Introduction
Recent years have seen increased interest in agroecology among peasant organizations
and rural social movements around the world. In the case of the rural peoples’
organizations that belong to La Vı´a Campesina (LVC), this is due to a convergence
of factors. On the one hand, participation by national organizations in a global
social movement has largely politicized the question of how land is farmed. This is especially because LVC views the contemporary period as characterized by an
historic clash between two models of farming : peasant agriculture versus
agribusiness (Rosset 2006, Martı´nez-Torres and Rosset 2010), where reproducing
the agribusiness model on one’s own land – by using purchased chemicals,
commercial seeds, heavy machinery, etc. – will also reproduce the forces of exclusion
and the destruction of nature that define the larger conflict. There is an increasing
search for alternatives by the grassroots membership of LVC member organizations,
partly in response to the dramatic fluctuations of prices of petroleum-based inputs
over recent years, putting these inputs largely beyond the reach of many peasant
farmers (Schill 2008).
The past three to five years have seen virtually every organization in LVC around
the world attempt to strengthen, initiate, or begin to plan its own program for
promoting, to varying extents, the transition to agroecological farming among their
members. [1] Although Holt-Gime´nez (2009, 2010) has argued that agroecology has in
practice been largely the provenance of community-based organizations and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) rather than national peasant organizations and
social movements, this, while once partially true, may now begin to change. Over the
past three years LVC has given a key role to its ‘International Working Group on
Sustainable Peasant Agriculture’. Among other tasks, this Working Group (with a
female and a male representative from each of the nine regions in which LVC divides
the globe), under the leadership of the National Small Farmers Association of Cuba
(ANAP) and the National Union of Peasant Associations of Mozambique (UNAC),
is charged with strengthening and thickening internal social networks (Fox 1996) for
the exchange of experiences and support for the agroecology work of the member
organizations. This includes identifying the most advanced positive experiences of
agroecology, and studying, analyzing and documenting them (sistematizacio´n in
Spanish) so that lessons drawn can be shared with organizations in other countries.
One of the first tasks carried out by the LVC Working Group was to document
the experience of the Campesino-a-Campesino Agroecology Movement in Cuba
(MACAC), based on the general feeling that it was the most illustrative case of
‘sustainable peasant agriculture’ and of farmer-to-farmer extension methodology.
The analysis reported in this paper (and in Machı´n Sosa et al. 2010) is the result of
this internal work. LVC and ANAP jointly designated a national-international team
to study the Cuban case, consisting of a male and a female representative from
ANAP in Cuba, and a male and a female representative from LVC outside of Cuba.
The idea behind such a composition of the team was to have gender balance, and to
produce a report that would be useful inside ANAP and Cuba and in other
countries. The main objective was to carry out an evaluation of the Cuban
experience and identify possible new steps for the future of ANAP’s work and that of
peasant organizations in LVC in other countries who are planning and/or carrying
out their own work with agroecology. The authors of the current paper were the
members of the team that carried out this study. We traveled the length and breadth
of Cuba two times during 2008 and 2009, visiting cooperatives and individual
peasant families in 13 of the 14 provinces. We visited dozens of farms and held
exchanges and workshops with farmers to collectively reconstruct the history of the
agroecology movement, its achievements, weaknesses and challenges. We also met
with ANAP leadership from the cooperative and municipal to the provincial and
national levels, as well as government officials, policy makers, researchers and
others who have direct relations with, or are experts on, the agroecology movement.
Finally we reviewed virtually all the internal files and documents of MACAC,
complementing our access to national level agricultural data, and to cooperative
level data from Sancti Spı´ritus province. This paper is the outcome of this self-study
process.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows : the next section is a brief
review of the fundamental principles and logic of agroecology, followed by a more
macro, historical overview of the development of Cuban agriculture on the eve of the
revolution and onwards. This is followed by a brief review of the contrasting
approaches of conventional and farmer-to-farmer extension work, before tracing the
history of MACAC in Cuba – its beginning as a project or program within ANAP
and its transformation into a national movement – along with the evolution of
agroecological farming techniques in Cuban agriculture. Finally, we turn to the
presentation and analysis of lessons, challenges, impacts and achievements of
MACAC (including data on increases in peasant food production output), followed
by a short concluding reflection.
Peter Michael Rosset, Braulio Machín
Sosa, Adilén María Roque Jaime & Dana Rocío Ávila Lozano
