Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of soil amendments, these Mayan farmers were initially reluctant.
Eventually, several agreed to try small experiments on their own land
and found similar success. They began to teach additional neighbors
through the pedagogically horizontal techniques of demonstration and
experimentation.
As Holt-Giménez (2006) describes in his in-depth study of the move-
ment, Chimaltenango's campesinos have accumulated a vast amount of
agroecological knowledge. With help from NGOs like Oxfam and World
Neighbors, they have spread their model of farmer-led agricultural devel-
opment to other parts of Guatemala and Mesoamerica. Regional farmers
responded well to the instruction of such
promotores
, who continuously
created new knowledge and new teachers through workshops and
exchanges. In contrast to the example offered by Lewis (chapter 5), as
well as the U.S.-based foundations that funded the Green Revolution,
this demonstrates the important supportive role that organizations based
in the global North can play when they highlight the knowledge and
skills of local people.
Success enabled Guatemalan campesinos to compete with their former
patrones.
In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan Army “disappeared”
several prominent promotores, while others fl ed. International NGOs
drew on their transnational networks to help some promotores fi nd work
in other parts of the region. Two such men became nonprofi t extension
agents in the Mexican town of Vicente Guerrero, where structural adjust-
ment programs had recently eliminated state assistance to small farmers.
Collectively, campesino teams began to establish school gardens, com-
munal orchards, and other community agricultural development projects
emphasizing collective local consumption rather than export. From
Mexico, Campesino a Campesino extended to Nicaragua and Cuba.
Unlike the Green Revolution, in which technological development was
led by U.S. scientists and diffused through state extension networks
(Rogers 1969), and the IMF and World Bank's structural adjustment
programs, in which outside consultants mandate on-the-ground prac-
tices, MCAC's pedagogy and methodology privilege the knowledge of
“local farmers in the development of their own agriculture” (Holt-
Giménez 2006, 79). Practically, this consists of teaching campesinos to
experiment, rapidly recognize successes, and work as extension agents
in passing on their new knowledge (Bunch 1996). Campesinos tended
to view professional extension agents with suspicion because of their
technocratic jargon, emphasis on helping banks recover loans, and lack
of farming experience (Holt-Giménez 2006). As demonstrated by the
