Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Here what the people are always talking and saying is that we want to have our
own tractor in the community with all the equipment to allow us to plough, to
allow our mates that are commited to plough for all the comrades, because a
lot of people would like to sow, and, well, what they sow is with a plough, with
a handlebar, harnessed to a horse. But they sow a litle bit, more for [self]-con-
sumption.
Informant 4, MOCASE-VC, interviewed 27.3.2010
Some communities of the MOCASE-VC do own a tractor, but not all of them are
able to purhase suh equipment. Lak of appropriate credit lines for purhasing and
maintaining even small-scale mahinery compels many communities to rely on tra-
ditional cultivation methods and this, in turn, constrains the scale of their produc-
tion.
The aspirations of the campesinos for land, affordable credit, appropriate ma-
hinery and the infrastructure and services that would assist them to improve pro-
duction and to provision both the domestic market and themselves with healthy
foodstuffs, are all articulated within their demand for an integral agrarian reform. In
their own words:
It is called an integral agrarian reform; not only to say 'come along, there you
have land and go for it'. [It's also about] infrastructure, training. If I give you 50
hectares of land and I tell you, 'you live there!' how would you live? You will
die of hunger because you have to have animals, knowledge, you have to have
a cistern of water, you have to have a ranh [house], you have to have hikens.
Then, you have to know, to learn, how to make an organic vegetable garden, how
to raise animals. And that is an agrarian reform … and not that it would be an
agrarian reform imposed by the government: “this is the agrarian reform!” They
should come and sit with us, those who really live [off the land and they should
ask us] what do we want? How do we want to manage it? How do we want to
implement it? That would be an agrarian reform; helping you with production,
with commercialization.
Informant 5, MOCASE-VC, interviewed 1.3.2010
Notwithstanding the local livelihood hallenges and the aspiration for an integral
agrarian reform, the counter-hegemonic discourse of the MOCASE-VC reahes far
beyond the local or the national. It is well recognized that the soyization process is
part of a global economic system that is not only unsustainable but also disastrous.
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