Scaling up Agroecology in Latin America: An Interview with Professor Peter M. Rosset

Image Courtesy of the Yale School of the Environment

By Irene Pérez Beltrán

 Peter M. Rosset is a half Mexican half American researcher and professor at ECOSUR’s Department of Agriculture, Society and Environment. He has also worked in various agroecology activism projects, most recently as part of the technical team of La Via Campesina’s (LVC) international secretariat. This interview discusses his work advocating for sustainable and just agricultural practices in Latin America.

Starting with a broad question, what does ‘scaling up agroecology’ mean to you?

For me scaling up agroecology means that there are more and more families of small-scale producers, peasants, and indigenous people, practicing agroecological farming, and that together, they account for a larger and larger territory. And so I think it's important that we're talking about many small things, and not a small number of big things, because somebody could mistake scaling up and think that it means instead of a small farm, we'll have a large corporate farm. So I don't mean scaling up in that sense.

So you identify two possible definitions for agroecology and how this can be problematic.

Yes, because we currently see that green agrobusiness is claiming to be agroecological. We think that's greenwashing agrobusiness. They're still doing large scale monoculture, they're still displacing people from the land, they're still getting the bulk of the profits from the food system. They're still doing many of the bad things that regular agrobusiness does just with a light green colour painted over it. So we feel that agroecology goes much deeper than just changing one thing. And so we consider that to be more like an opportunistic and fake agroecology.

And so, within this agroecological framework, how would you describe your previous work in La Via Campesina?

So as a technically trained person, and not a peasant, my role in La Via Campesina was never to make political decisions or decide what the movement should do. Because we strongly believe in Via Campesina that all strategic decisions must be made by peasant leaders, women and men, and that technical staff should not control a grassroots movement. So our role as technical staff is to support the leadership, which comes from the peasants, small farmers and indigenous peoples, so that they can implement their vision through their organizations that they represent in the different regions.

Indeed, something that you have emphasized in your scholarly work is the importance of giving peasants autonomy in order to proliferate agroecological practices. However, many farmers in Latin America are deeply dependent on their role as agricultural exporters within global value chains. What role do you think international institutions like the World Trade Organization have in these dependency structures and how has LVC reacted to it?

Well, the World Trade Organization is maybe the worst of all of the international agencies in that they really don't even make any pretensions about who they represent. They represent the free flow of capital and goods at the international level. They absolutely in no way represent people's interests. And they don't even represent government interest because the WTO dispute resolution mechanism allows corporations to sue governments but doesn't allow governments or people to sue corporations. So anything that a government does that's even halfway good can be challenged in the WTO.

I can give you an example, during the former  governments in Brazil under Lula and Dilma, they had some interesting programs to help scale up agroecology on public acquisition of food. So governments would acquire a lot of food for school lunches, hospitals, government institution cafeterias, for many things. And because the peasant movements in Brazil really mobilized, they got those governments to accept that 30% of all of the food for government acquisition and school lunches should come from peasant producers, and if it was agroecologically produced it should automatically get a higher price. So this created a really big guaranteed market for peasant cooperatives, who wanted to become agroecological. But then the United States under the Obama administration wrote a letter to the World Trade Organization, arguing that the public acquisition of food from peasants in Brazil was a  market distortion, which is a violation of WTO free trade guidelines and regulations. Now, it never actually came to the dispute resolution mechanism, however with the change to a right-wing government, they started to cancel all the purchasing contracts. And this was very bad because when the peasants had the ability to scale up their production, they were encouraged by the government plan to take out loans from the bank. Their ability to pay that debt was based on the assumption that they would continue to have that contract in the future. So then when they lost the buyers, peasant cooperatives collapsed. This relates to peasant autonomy, because it generates a debate now in Brazil amongst the peasant organizations saying, if we want to scale up, peasant autonomy is the best way to do it. Because if we are dependent on a government policy, then we'll be vulnerable to a change of government. And so instead of trying to get a government program to go from a small production to a big production all at once, we can try to create a local peasant market in the local town, maybe a peasant market in the city, maybe we ally with a consumer cooperative. And so we build it on our own through our own relationships.

But what about farmers that cannot sell all of their produce locally? Coffee, for example, has a very high demand in the Global North but can only be produced in specific regions such as Colombia. How can Colombian coffee smallholders break their dependency ties?

I think it's fine for small producers to produce coffee for the international market. But it's a big mistake when they use all their land just for coffee. And I can give you an example of Chiapas, Mexico, where several studies show that families who only produce coffee have what are called the months of hunger, meses de hambre, every year because they sell all their coffee and then they get paid one time in the whole year. And so what these studies found was that a larger proportion of the land dedicated to coffee correlated with a higher income, but with a lower nutritional level for the smallholders’ children. So basically, you cannot depend just on coffee, it's too much dependence. Coffee prices go up and down and crops get infected by diseases; we recently had the coffee rust for like three years in a row wipe out 60 to 70% of the yield for small producers. And the ones who were best off were the ones who had it who had the coffee but also honey, because the food crops allow them to survive, but the honey turned out to be an alternative income source when the coffee income was lost. To be more autonomous you need to be more diversified.

Peter M. Rosset highlights the issues to achieve sustainable and just agricultural practices in Latin America. Local, peasant-to-peasant cooperation, diversification of production, and environmental justice activism are some of the starting points Rosset advocates for, in order to scale up agroecology in Latin America and achieve a more equitable form of agriculture that is produced in harmony with the environment.

Irene Pérez Beltrán is a second-year International Relations student at King’s College London with a passion for Latin American literature and sustainable development.