Part of the grounds and house where the Agroecology Institute for Rural Women will be set up. Credit: Courtesy of ANAMURI

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jan 4 2014 (IPS)

An organisation that brings together some 10,000 peasant and indigenous women from Chile is launching an agroecology institute for women campesinos, or small farmers, in South America.

For years, the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI) has been training thousands of people through La Vía Campesina, the international peasant movement, working on the basis of food sovereignty, which asserts the right of people to define their own food systems.

But today it is undertaking its most ambitious project.

The Agroecology Institute for Rural Women (IALA) will be the first in Latin America to only target women. It is taking shape in the town of Auquinco – which roughly means “the sound of water” in the Mapuche indigenous language – in the district of Chépica, 180 km south of Santiago.

The training sessions have already started, even though the building isn’t ready yet.

“We aren’t pursuing a dream, but a challenge,” the international director of ANAMURI, Francisca Rodríguez, who will run IALA, told Tierramérica*.

The project has a political core: “food production to resolve the problem of hunger.”

“It is essential to find ways to make it possible for us to continue surviving and existing as an important segment of agriculture amidst the fierce attack on campesinos, which has to do with productive sectors but also with the models of consumption,” she said.

IALA is focused on defending campesino family agriculture, she said.

It’s an effort to join in “the big task” of the Agroecology Institutes of Latin America, from which it took its acronym, she said.

These projects began in Venezuela, where the first agronomists – all children from campesino families – have graduated.

The IALA institutes were replicated later in Brazil and Paraguay, as well as Ecuador and the rest of the Andean region. The latest major achievement has been the SURI Campesino University, which opened its doors in Argentina in April 2013.

“It’s important for us to have professionals in the field of agriculture, in order to help achieve food sovereignty, and to continue along this route which requires specialists who have come from the land itself,” Rodríguez said.

“No one better than campesinos can feel the need to continue developing agriculture that is at the service of humanity,” she added.

Rodríguez said that in ANAMURI “we understand the challenge,” and while the institute will initially focus on women from the Southern Cone of South America, it could later be expanded to incorporate men.

In Auquinco, they have a one-hectare plot and a large house where the students will stay, purchased for just 23,000 dollars. They said the price was low because after the former owners, a couple who had gone into exile during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, returned to the country, they decided to sell the property to the women so the group could do good work with it.

Because of the damages it suffered during the February 2010 earthquake, however, the house needs extensive repairs, though the architects that evaluated the damage assured them it will maintain its character as a traditional rural dwelling, after the renovation.

The repairs must begin as soon as possible, said ANAMURI director of organisation Alicia Muñoz.

“During the current [southern hemisphere] summer, we have to organise brigades of volunteers to help us fix up the house and the grounds, so that it won’t lose its original character,” Muñoz said.

ANAMURI decided that 2014 would be “the year of restoration” – a volunteer campaign that starts Jan. 4 with a visit to the building to clear the overgrown vegetation and begin the most urgent part of the remodeling: fixing the roof.

“Our dream is having an institute for the conservation of the kind of agriculture that women know how to do, that is truly trustworthy from the point of view of health and nutrients,” Muñoz said.

In the history of Chilean agriculture, men have always dominated the scene, “with women relegated to the domestic sphere, to the processing of food, keeping house and raising the small livestock,” anthropologist Juan Carlos Skewes told Tierramérica.

But “their contribution, in my view fundamental, to agricultural work and to the alternative development project that is the vegetable garden, has been forgotten,” he added.

“Every vegetable patch, every campesino family farming practice, involves biodiversity, conservation of genetic material, the possibility of reproducing seeds and making better use of local resources,” said Skewes, director of the School of Anthropology at the Alberto Hurtado University.

“There is also the question of better coordination of resources, self-sufficiency and strengthening local economies,” he added.

“So, summing up, there are autonomous projects, a capacity for self-management, autonomous sustainable production, and management of non-genetically-modified material, and there is a chance to counteract, resist or challenge industrial processes in agribusiness, as well as the food processing industry,” he said.

The expert said that “in these tremendously contemporary aspects, the key player is the rural peasant woman, organised in the protection of seeds for self-consumption and the sustainable management of agriculture.”

In ANAMURI, the new year is full of hope. The participants are confident that the new government, to be headed by a woman, socialist former president Michelle Bachelet, will open up doors for them to strengthen their work.

They are also confident in receiving support from the United Nations, which declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

“Many people are going back to the countryside, which means there is hope,” said
Rodríguez. “We know we’re helping to strengthen the country on our parcel of land in Auquinco.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Chelmet Padmamma (second from the left), walks with other women near Babanagar village, Medak district, Andhra Pradesh state in southern India. The village is 170 kilometres from Hyderabad. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Chelmet Padmamma, 42, of Babanagar village in southern India’s drought-prone Medak district, is a happy woman: the rain has come earlier this year, thrice soaking the three-acre farm that she co-owns with four other women from her village.

“This is a dry area and we are dependent on rain. Now that the rain is here, we are going to sow rice. Normally, we would be working in others’ farms as daily wagers. But this year we are taking a month-long break to work on our own farm,” she says, rubbing a red ball of clay in her palm."Such a farming model should be nurtured all over the world because it can be the way to solve the world’s food crisis." -- Subramanium Kannaiyan of La Via Campesina

Padmamma is one of the 15 million rural Indians who have been landless for generations, instead working land owned by people of a higher caste. The farm that she now co-owns is the result of a government initiative called the National Rural Livelihood Mission (CNRLM), which provides land on lease for collective farming.

The initiative aims to provide “space for self-help, mutual cooperation and collective action for social and economic development” for marginalised rural citizens, especially women.

Originally a federal plan, the initiative is implemented by state and local government agencies that consult with village communities. NGOs help identify and select farmers who are both socially and economically marginalised, own no land and can benefit the most from the collective farming method.

D.V. Raidu is the head of Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA), a project under CNRLM in Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India. Raidu told IPS that collective farming has brought unprecedented results, helping over one million people in 8,000 villages overcome poverty and social indignity in eight years’ time.

“This project started in 2004 as a step to eliminate rural poverty,” he said. “We focus on women because they are the most marginalised, without any access to land or money. We help women to build village-based cooperatives. We then take on lease land from villagers who have large landholdings and give that to these cooperatives.

“Typically, each woman has about half an acre of land to herself. In the cooperative, they generate microloans to buy seeds, while we give them free training in farm techniques like multi-cropping [and] composting.”

According to Raidu, cost recovery has been nearly 100 percent, although this is not a profit-driven initiative. Buoyed by the success, the cooperatives are now planning to launch their own raw produce brand and the government intends to promote it.

“The plan is to package the surplus produce like lentils and vegetables in the market under the brand name ‘Krushi’ which means ‘agriculture,’” Raidu said.

Still, some experts argue that the land tenure system in India is so badly skewed only comprehensive reform can fix it.

Dabjeet Sarangi, an agriculturist with Living Farms, an NGO that defends indigenous farmers’ right to forest land and forest produce, noted that, “According to the World Bank, 60 percent of India’s total land is cultivable, but records are available only for less than 50 percent of that.

“Also, studies by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have shown that different states have different land tenure systems. This is a big hurdle. For example, communities like indigenous people have no rights over the land despite living on it for generations.”

Sarangi hopes that at the 38th session of the annual conference of FAO, scheduled to take place in Rome from Jun. 15-22, the urgency of effective land reform would be on the agenda.

“A true people’s movement cannot be driven by the government alone. But, if communities have to start collective farming on their own, they first have to have access to land,” he said.

Subramanium Kannaiyan, a farmers’ leader from India and spokesman for La Via Campesina, a worldwide movement of small and marginal farmers, is also an advocate of collective farming.

Speaking to IPS from Jakarta, where La Via Campesina just held its fifth global conference, Kannaiyan said that, “Collective farming In India has proved to be very successful. It will definitely be successful in other developed countries as well. We believe that such a farming model should be nurtured all over the world because it can be the way to solve the world’s food crisis.”

However, Kannaiyan also warns that cooperatives should not be in a hurry to enter the market and should instead focus on attaining local food security.

“Co-operatives should not behave like corporate houses and, instead of making profits, they should serve the real interest of the peasants which is protection of land and production of food in a sustainable manner.”

Raidu disagrees. “There is nothing wrong in cooperatives entering the competitive markets. In India, there are already several cooperative-owned brands that are earning big profits.

“For example, Amul, the largest-selling dairy-based product brand, is owned by a cooperative. When a farmers’ collective earns money, it goes back to the community. So, there is no reason to discourage them from entering the market,” he said.