Maya farmer Leonardo Puc shows an achiote seedling, whose seeds give colour and flavour to a variety of Mexican food recipes, in a cornfield in the municipality of Tadhziú, in the southeastern state of Yucatán. Image: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
CHACSINKIN, Mexico, Nov 25 2024 (IPS)

María Bacab, a Native Maya, considers herself the “guardian of seeds” as she cares for the milpa – an ancestral Mesoamerican polyculture that mixes maize, beans, squash and other vegetables – and promotes its practice and use in Mexico.

“I worked with my parents since I was a little girl, I learned with them. The milpa is a benefit, because we don’t buy corn. I like it, because we’ve been doing it since we were children,” she told IPS in the community of X’box (the black one, in the Mayan language), in Chansinkin, a municipality in the state of Yucatán, southeastern Mexico.

The peasant farmer combines family care work with agriculture. After cooking breakfast and taking her children to school, Bacab, 41, who is divorced and has seven children, works on her one-hectare plot of land, returns at 11 a.m. to care for her children who go to secondary school, and then goes back to planting.

Each year, she grows 750 kilograms of grain for her own use, raises a pig, a native species of this Mexican region, and weaves hammocks to supplement her income. Her three eldest children help on the plantation.

Bacab is the only woman in a group of 11 milpa producers in X’box who store and exchange seeds. They select the best and save them for a year, which prepares them for shortages or losses due to flooding or droughts. The municipality has at least two seed banks .

Each farmer in the group plants different varieties, so that multiple maize options persist, including several drought-resistant ones, and some have hives for sale and self-consumption. They have adopted seeds from the southern state of Chiapas, and theirs have reached neighbouring Campeche, with which they share the Yucatan peninsula.

The peninsula is home to the majority of the Maya population, one of Mexico’s 71 indigenous groups and one of the most culturally and historically representative.

Maize is not only a native and predominant crop in Mexico, but a staple product in the diet of its 129 million inhabitants that transcends the culinary to become part of the country’s cultural roots, linked to the native peoples.

At harvest time, generally from January to March, the furrows of the cornfield are bright with green canes, from which the ears of corn hang waiting for the harvesting hand. From their rows will come the grains that end up in dough, tortillas (flat breads made from nixtamalised grain), atoles (thick drinks) and various other dishes.

Mexico’s three million corn farmers plant around eight million hectares, of which two million are for family use, in a country that has 64 varieties of the grain, 59 of which are native.

Mexico is the world’s seventh largest producer of maize, the world’s most widely grown cereal, and its second largest importer. It harvests some 27 million tonnes annually, but still has to import another 20 million tonnes to meet its domestic consumption.

As in the rest of the country, the milpa is key to the diet in the municipality of Chansinkin. Inhabited by 3,255 people, nine out of 10 were poor and one third were extremely poor in 2023.

Mayan farmer Ricardo Piña grows 14 varieties of maize, and stores the seeds for future planting and exchange, in the community of X’box, municipality of Chacsinkin, in the state of Yucatán, southeastern Mexico. Image: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Seeding the future

The Milpa para la Vida project, implemented by the US non-governmental organisation Heifer International since 2021, with funding from the US-based John Deere Foundation, promotes the improvement of milpa collectives such as the one in X’box.

The initiative is one of several in Yucatán that seeks to defend the territory and offer economic options in rural areas.

It aims to increase incomes by at least 19%, milpa productivity by at least 41%, and the amount of land under sustainable management by 540 hectares among participating farmers in 10 communities from Yucatán and two others in Campeche.

Since 2021, the project has benefited 10,800 people and the goal is to reach 40,000 by 2027.

Demonstration plots have achieved a production of 1.3 tonnes of maize per hectare, through agroecological practices such as the use of native seeds and biofertilisers, compared to the 630 kilograms harvested in 2021 with conventional practices.

But constraints remain, such as the application of pesticides and fertilisers donated by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Mayan farmers check a milpa, an ancient system of polyculture of maize, beans, squash and other vegetables that has spread from Mexico throughout Mesoamerica, in the municipality of Tadhziú, Yucatán state, in southeastern Mexico. Image: Emilio Godoy / IPS

In the neighbouring municipality of Tahdziú (place of the zui bird, in Mayan), 65-year-old Maya farmer Leonardo Puc treasures his seeds as his most precious commodity.

Although there was enough rain this year after an intense drought in 2023, “we face many difficulties, a lot of budworm (which eats the maize plant). We need maize to feed ourselves, producing it is what we do. We can’t just sit back and do nothing,” the farmer told IPS.

“That’s why nature teaches us,” said the married father with six children and coordinator of the 28-member Flor de Tajonal group, named after an emblematic local flower.

There are five seed banks in the Tahdziú area. In a hut with a high roof of huano, a local palm tree, and walls of wooden beams, transparent plastic jars with white lids line a shelf. They hold a key part of peasant life: seeds of yellow and white maize, squash and black beans.

Tahdziú also lives amidst deprivation, as its 5,502 inhabitants are practically all poor, and half of them live in extreme poverty.

Flora Chan inspects a hen in the pen at her home in the municipality of Maní, in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán. Image: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Chickens that change lives

Flora Chan’s mother used to buy and raise chickens, so she was no stranger to the cage-free poultry egg farmer programme she joined in 2020 to improve her family’s economy.

“When we started, it was hard because people didn’t know about our eggs. Now they buy every day,” she told IPS in the courtyard of her home in the municipality of Maní (where it all happened, in Mayan), near Chacsinkin.

Chan, who is single and childless, has 39 hens and wants more. Every day she collects between 40 and 50 eggs. She cleans the henhouse early, checks the water and feed and rate of production. She also weaves textiles and oversees 100 hives of stingless melipona bees, a species endemic to the region and with highly prized honey.

A group of 217 women farmers, 19 in Maní, formed the Kikiba Collective (something very good, in Mayan) and whose seal, a hen, goes on each unit.

The breeders belong to the Mujeres Emprendedoras initiative, which began in 2020 in 93 communities from 30 municipalities in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán, with the help of the organisation Heifer.

A group of 19 women egg farmers make up the Colectivo Kikiba in the municipality of Maní, in the state of Yucatán, in southeastern Mexico. Image: Emilio Godoy / IPS

The programme aims to strengthen local livelihoods in order to alleviate hunger, poor nutrition due to lack of animal protein and low incomes due to lack of market access.

In Mani, three quarters of the 6,129 inhabitants suffer from poverty and one fifth from extreme poverty.

Each participant receives training in the installation of backyard chicken coops, animal care and business management. Each year they replace the batch of 50 birds they receive and pass theirs on to a new member, until the birds stop laying and the women then use them at home or sell them at local markets.

The programme has covered 796 women farmers, with the goal of reaching 1,000 by 2026. The Kikiba Collective delivers 4,300 free-range eggs each week to two restaurants of a well-known Mexican restaurant chain in Merida, the capital of Yucatan. In addition, it sells retail and allocates 30% for family consumption.

At first, Chan’s neighbour Nancy Interiano was not interested in the project, but her friend convinced her to check it out. Today, the 43-year-old businesswoman, who is married with three children, has 60 laying hens.

“Seeing the results, other women are interested in joining and those who are already involved want to increase their poultry houses. With our knowledge and experience, we advise the new ones,” she told IPS.

In Mexico, 14.7 million women live in rural areas, representing almost 23% of all women and 12% of Mexico’s total population.

Due to a lack of suppliers of laying hens, breeders are limited in their ability to meet growing demand.

While solving this is out of their hands, Chan and Interiano enjoy every day watching their hens scratching the ground, climbing on wooden beams or settling into nests to lay the eggs that have changed their lives.

Elderly Kiché Maya people of Guatemala await the start of the new era. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

The Maya Indians of Central America and Mexico will have little to celebrate when the current era comes to an end on Dec. 21. The extreme poverty and marginalisation they face contrast sharply with the plans for lavish celebrations to lure tourists.

According to the ancient Maya calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 will mark the end of a grand cycle of 13 144,000-day “baktuns”, lasting 5,126 years.

“It’s offensive, it’s an insult, and it is contradictory for indigenous people to continue to be steeped in poverty while public funds are squandered on celebrating,” activist Ricardo Cajas, of the non-governmental Guatemalan Council of Maya Organisations (COMG), told IPS.

“There is nothing to celebrate,” he said. “This is an event involving traditional wisdom, which allows us to make an analysis of the ‘internal colonialism’ we see in Guatemala, where a dominant class keeps indigenous people in a state of subsistence and extreme poverty.”

In Guatemala, indigenous people make up close to 40 percent of the population of 15 million according to official statistics, although native organisations put the figure at over 60 percent.

But Guatemala has never had an indigenous president, and only 19 of the 158 members of the single-chamber Congress are Indians. And the only member of the cabinet who identifies himself as native is the minister of culture and sports, Carlos Batzín.

Governments in “Mesoamerica” – a cultural area extending from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, where advanced civilisations like the Maya flourished before Spain’s colonisation of the Americas – are planning major celebrations of the end of the Maya long-count calendar.

This vast impoverished area is highly vulnerable to earthquakes, like the 7.4-magnitude quake that struck Guatemala’s Pacific coast Wednesday, leaving at least 52 people dead and 22 missing.

The hype and promotion surrounding the end of the current era has led to a surge in global interest in the ancient Maya civilisation and to an explosion of tourism to Maya historical and cultural sites in Mesoamerica.

According to historians, the 13th baktun began on Aug. 11, 3114 BC and ends Dec. 21, 2012, and a new era begins the following day.

The end of the current baktun has also given rise to predictions of catastrophes and even prophecies about the end of the world, which have been debunked by indigenous leaders.

Doomsday tourism

In Guatemala, for example, tourism industry authorities report that 15 official ceremonies will be held, including a major multimedia presentation on the legacy of the ancient Maya on Dec. 20 at Tikal, Guatemala’s most famous Maya archaeological site, in the northern province of Petén.

The preparations for the ceremonies have cost the Ministry of Culture and the Guatemalan Tourism Institute some 8.5 million dollars, according to the non-governmental Indigenous Observatory.

Thanks to government promotional campaigns, Guatemala, Honduras, El
Salvador and Belize are expecting some five million visitors, and Mexico around 10 million in its southern states alone – an average of 10 percent more than last year, according to the Maya World Organisation, which groups the region’s tourism institutes.

But while state coffers will swell with the increased revenues, the authorities will continue to ignore the needs of indigenous people in their budgets, native leaders complain.

Cajas laid the blame on the free market-based “20th century neoliberal socioeconomic system” which “does not have ethics and morals, and tramples the rights of indigenous people,” including the right to land.

Around 80 percent of Guatemala’s farmland is in the hands of just five percent of farmers. But 61 percent of the population is rural and 80 percent of the mainly indigenous rural population is poor, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“In Central America, indigenous people have historically been among the poorest segments of the population,” Néstor Pérez, an activist with the Central American Indigenous Council (CICA), based in the capital of El Salvador, told IPS.

Paradoxically, “indigenous territories have great natural and mineral wealth, but in many cases economic interests are put above the collective rights of native people, in violation of the national and international laws that protect their rights,” he added.

Pérez lamented that the end of the 13th baktun was being used to draw in tourists, with a focus that displays indigenous people and their traditional practices “merely as folkloric shows.”

He said that what were needed were public policies aimed at improving the economic and social conditions of native people.

From splendour to dire poverty

Highly complex, advanced societies with enormous cultural, scientific and biological wealth, such as the Maya, Olmec and Aztec, flourished in Mesoamerica until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

Latin America is home to an estimated 400 native groups, representing around 50 million people. Ninety percent of Latin America’s native people live in the Andes highlands regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and in Mesoamerica.

Indigenous people continue to face severe marginalisation in the region, said Dalí Ángel, an activist with the Mexico City-based Alliance of Indigenous Women of Central America and Mexico.

The native people of Honduras are one illustration, said Timoteo López with the private Chortí Maya National Indigenous Council. “Our development is limited in part because power has only served to protect the interests of those who are governing,” he told IPS.

The Chortí Maya people of Honduras, where Indians represent seven percent of the population of 7.7 million, have made progress in the area of education, he said, but “at the cost of political activism that has even led to death threats and murders of leaders.”

Ángel, meanwhile, was especially concerned about the concessions that the Mexican government has granted to transnational corporations in indigenous territories without carrying out proper consultations with local communities affected by mining, oil industry, logging projects or hydropower dams, as required by the International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.

“The Mexican state has always granted concessions to industries, but lately foreign companies have been given greater facilities to operate here, by means of constitutional reforms,” the Zapoteca activist told IPS.

Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest indigenous population in absolute numbers, which is variously estimated to make up between 10 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who speak an indigenous language).

The country’s native inhabitants are largely concentrated in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, according to the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. In these two states and in the neighbouring state of Guerrero, one of every three people lives in absolute poverty, the Observatory of Social Policy and Human Rights (OPSDH) reports.

“They’re selling everything, even the air,” Ángel said. She complained that the country’s outgoing president, the conservative Felipe Calderón, recently inaugurated a wind power project in the Tehuantepec isthmus in southeast Mexico “where he used deceit to force local communities to sign contracts to yield part of their territory to Spanish companies.”

The activist also mentioned the case of Wirikuta, a 140,000-hectare territory in the Chihuahua desert in the central state of San Luis Potosí that is considered sacred by the Wixarika or Huichol people. According to the National Human Rights Commission, mining projects threaten the environment there.