Educating for Food Sovereignty and Peace in Colombia: The Praxis of the Latin American Institute of Agroecology María Cano

• In Event: Climate Resilience, Agroecology, and Environmental Justice

Proposal

This paper is part of a larger research project that explores how sustainable agriculture education at the Latin American Institutes of Agroecology (IALAs) in Colombia, Chile, and Nicaragua produce agroecological knowledge networks in rural peasant unions and social movements, and how students in these networks create material and social transformations of the landscape. We employ comparative ethnography, social network analysis, geospatial techniques, and participatory video methodologies to explore how factors such as geography, economic and political context, gender, and ethnicity, structure both pedagogy and the efficacy of agroecological education in advancing food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples and nations to create and control their own food system through culturally sound methods that enhance financial autonomy, ecological sustainability, and diversified livelihoods (Chappell et al., 2013). The findings from this research are positioned to improve sustainable agricultural pedagogies, advancing resilience to climate change, and reducing environmentally and socially destructive agricultural practices across the globe.

In Latin America, the legacies of extractive colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and centuries of enslavement of Africans and African descendants produced huge inequities in land access that remain to this day (Rosset et al., 2021; Galeano, 1971; Kalmanovitz et al., 1994; Quijano, 2014). Since the Green Revolution of the 1940s and 1950s, agribusiness has dominated the Latin American countryside, promoting agricultural monocropping for commodity export. Industrial farming is one of the most notorious contributors to climate change, in addition to increasing rural poverty and rural-to-urban migration. Furthermore, deforestation is often a result of land grabbing linked to extensive cattle ranching, illegal logging, and construction associated with large development projects (Bejarano, 1982; Kalmanovitz et al., 1994). Schools have also contributed to the mass exodus from the countryside, as students from rural communities are frequently taught that their only opportunities for success are moving to urban areas (McCune et al., 2017; Tarlau, 2019).

Our central research questions focus on pedagogy, praxis, and agricultural change, asking: (1) How do agroecological pedagogies result in networks of new knowledge? (2) How are these pedagogies and networks of new knowledge shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity? (3) How have these networks of new knowledge contributed to agroecological praxis, including material and immaterial (i.e., social) transformations of the landscape? Importantly, these questions are not intended simply as a project evaluation of the IALAs themselves. Rather, answering these questions will yield new scientific knowledge on how disparate social factors structure pedagogical practices, and in turn students’ efforts to materially transform the landscape in diverse contexts. The research will also contribute to broader academic debates about the role of social movements in sustaining grassroots education programs and how students put environmental learning into practice (Niesz, 2019; Stevenson et al., 2013).

The context of the study was the IALAs themselves, as well as several rural communities in each country where cohorts of graduates from these IALAs were living. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory action research in Latin America (Fals-Borda, 1987), the research team included both the academic principal investigator and co-principal investigators as well local research assistant from each of the three IALAs. The incorporation of assistants from the IALAs themselves on the research team was an important part of our collaborative research methodology. We also employed the Latin American methodology of sistematización—a process of collectively reflecting on and making sense of pedagogical experiences, turning lessons into new knowledge that informs ongoing educational initiatives (Selener, 1996). Sistematización requires continually ensuring collective spaces for the synthesis, analysis, and sharing of data, transforming research from a primarily individual endeavor into a collective learning process.

In this paper, we explore the findings that have emerged from our research in Colombia, where the IALA María Cano was founded in 2017 in a territory of fierce past agrarian conflicts in the context of Colombia’s many decades of violencia. Drawing on lessons learned from this co-designed educational and research project, this paper explores how the IALA María Cano in Colombia develops agroecological pedagogies to help students grow into leaders who promote and practice agroecology and non-violence in their territories, even as Colombia takes steps in the direction of peace, land reform and recognition of peasants as social actors. We systematize the findings from a participatory action research project led by a group of students at the IALA María Cano about their communities and their agroecological praxis in a context of peace agreement-related agrarian reform. The paper explores how structural factors such as geography, economic and political context, gender, and ethnicity, and histories of trauma and violence affect both pedagogy and the efficacy of agroecological education, as well as the protagonism of educators and students in shaping these processes. The findings in the paper illustrate how social movements have developed sustainable agricultural pedagogies that improve resilience to climate change while reducing environmentally and socially unsound agricultural practices.

Authors

• Nils McCune, Institute for Agroecology at the University of Vermont

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University