Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 50

1990s that its cultivation with maize substantially increased cereal yields.
The important thing is that Mucuna is grown as a soil improver. It can fix
150 kilogrammes of nitrogen per hectare each year - a free resource for
farmers. For every hectare, it also annually produces 50-100 tonnes of
biomass. This plant material is allowed to fall on the soil as a green manure,
suppressing weeds and helping to build the soil. In this bean lies the
protection of the Petén rainforest. Build the health of the soil, and farmers
no longer want to burn trees in order to create new fields. Reclaiming land
for agriculture is, after all, difficult and dangerous work, and farmers
would love an alternative. An improvement to soil health changes the way
that farmers think and act. They see the benefit of staying in the same
place, and of investing in the same fields for themselves and their children.
Seven years after first standing at Tikal with Sergio Ruano, I came back
to see how far farmers had developed their new settled ways. I walked with
another colleague from Centro Maya, Juan Carlos Moreira, near the
Usumacinta River, the Guatemalan border with Mexico. It is another area
of extraordinary biodiversity. Inside the forest - this silent and eerie
natural cathedral - the air was heavy with humidity and pierced with
sunlight let in through holes in the canopy far above. By some wonderful
coincidence of names, this was called the Cooperativa La Felicidad, or
Happiness Cooperative. On this real political and administrative frontier,
250 farmers now grow Mucuna in their fields and have begun a journey
across a cognitive frontier, towards settled and sustainable agriculture. I
asked one, Gabino Leiva, about the bean manure, as they call it: ' The bean
manure destroys the weeds; the beans simply kill them, and all the crops flourish much more.
This is what we all need to do - manure our soil for increased production.' It is
technically easy. Improve the soils through low-cost, environmentally
sound methods, save the remaining rainforests, and reclaim the monoscape
for the people who live there.
There remain, of course, many confounding factors. The forests may
still disappear under the chain-saws of the loggers; farm families still lack
access to markets; and the adoption of these new settled systems of
agriculture necessarily means the loss of systems of shifting agriculture,
with their associated knowledge and sub-climax biodiversity. Moreover,
this progress towards sustainable agriculture is being made despite current
policies. What would happen if we were able to get these right, too?
Concluding Comments
In this chapter, I began with some reflections on the darker side of the
landscape. Throughout history, there are painful stories of exclusion, with