The SANE process in Latin America

These changes have widened the gap between peasants and commercial farmers, despite the fact that the absolute number of small farmers and peasants has increased, but the average size of their landholdings has decreased. On the one hand, large landowners control most of the best agricultural lands, the best soils and in many cases, the water resources. Small farmers, on the other hand, are pushed up the slopes or into colonizing the low humid tropics, thereby accelerating the advance of the agricultural frontier within the consequent process of deforestation and erosion. The peasant population on the hillsides represents 40% to 60% of the rural poor, occupying up to 30% of the total agricultural lands. Peasant production nevertheless contributes to urban food requirements, in effect subsidizing nearby towns and cities given the low prices they receive for their products.

The rural environments in Latin America are experiencing profound transformations triggered by globalization and neoliberal policies that are aimed at increasing economic returns and foreign exchange earnings. With an increasing awareness of the negative impacts of these transformations, a grassroots sustainable agricultural movement has been taking shape over the last two decades. This movement seeks to address both the environmental degradation and the socioeconomic impacts on resource-poor farmers that are associated with recent agricultural intensification³.

The urgent need to combat rural poverty and to regenerate the deteriorated resource base of small farms stimulated a number of NGOs throughout the region to actively search for new strategies of bottom-up agricultural development and resource management. These are based on mobilizing local participation, skills and resources, with the objective of enhancing productivity while conserving the resource base. The central idea of this approach is that development and research should start with what is already there: local people, their needs and aspirations, their farming knowledge, and their local natural resources.

In the late 1980’s, several Latin American NGOs implementing agroecological initiatives came to recognize gaps in their knowledge base and technical skills. They also realized that the magnitude of their task was greater than the capacities of any one individual organization. Furthermore, many NGOs felt the need to network in order to carry out a collective and regional effort of capacity building, institutional strengthening and technological innovation, while still maintaining their particular approaches given the unique social, ecological and ethnic realities of peasant agriculture in each of their countries.

Convinced of the need for a new kind of institutional arrangement that could foster a more in-depth expression of agroecology and its application in rural development, a group of twelve South American NGOs representing 9 countries, created the Consorcio Latino Americano sobre Agroecología y Desarrollo (CLADES -- Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development) in January 1989 in a meeting in Santiago, Chile. The Consortium’s members share a concern over the process of systematic impoverishment that peasant agriculture is undergoing, with populations rising, land-holdings becoming smaller, environments degrading and per capita food production remaining static or declining. Thus more than a network, CLADES was conceived as a "working plan" based on members’ shared needs. Of paramount importance for CLADES was the need for new forms of research and extension capabilities that translate into specific actions to improve rural peoples’ lives while conserving the natural resource base. In view of the deepening rural crisis, the Consortium’s central goal has been to prevent the collapse of peasant agriculture in the region by transforming it into a more sustainable and productive one.

After much investment in the areas of agroecological training and information dissemination, CLADES’ efforts paid off. Over the last decade many CLADES-linked NGOs have demonstrated a unique ability to understand the specific and differentiated nature of small farm production and have promoted successful experiences in generation and transfer of peasant technology. A key point has been to define a new agricultural approximation to the peasant production process based on agroecological principles. This approach not only differs technically from the Green Revolution approach in that it emphasizes low-input techniques, but also in broader aspects related to crops involved, beneficiaries, research requirements, local participation, and other socioeconomic criteria (Table 1). Preliminary evaluations of some of CLADES-NGO activities show that agroecological schemes have resulted in tangible benefits for the local populations such as enhanced food production, regeneration and improved quality of natural resources, and higher use-efficiency of local resources.

For CLADES, it became obvious that lessons derived from such experiences should be shared with other organizations. It therefore had an interest in joining SANE as a way to link up with NGOs in Central America and the Caribbean. At the SANE regional consultation held in El Salvador from August 12-14, 1994, CLADES was nominated and became SANE’s regional coordinating organization in Latin America. The central goal of the meeting was twofold:

1. To identify on-going sustainable agriculture initiatives in the new target region
2. To define methods to strengthen, scale up and disseminate such initiatives.

In short, the meeting sought to further refine the concept of an agroecological lighthouse and to identify NGOs, locations and projects where lighthouses could be crystallized with SANE assistance.

Following the selection of lighthouse criteria, three countries, Cuba, El Salvador and Peru, were selected to implement lighthouse activities, taking advantage of the unique socioeconomic and political junctures and organizational potentials prevailing in each selected country:

Cuba. With the sudden drop in agrochemical imports due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a national mobilization was underway to develop biologically based alternative agricultural technologies. The Asociación Cubana de Agricultura Orgánica (ACAO -- Cuban Asociation of Organic Agriculture) has played a pioneering role in advancing alternative agriculture on the island and was thus an ideal partner for SANE.

Peru. The local government in Cajamarca was supportive of agroecological approaches and capable of coordinating the efforts of various organizations. Among these organizations is the Centro de Investigación, Educación y Desarrollo (CIED -- Center for Research, Education and Development) which for years has been advancing agroecological proposals at the watershed level, and was therefore an appropriate SANE partner.

El Salvador. Reconstruction following twelve years of civil war are central peacetime concerns, including resettlement of rural areas and the establishment of viable farming communities. The Coordinadora de Agricultura Ecológica de El Salvador (COAGRES -- Coordinator for Ecologically-based Agriculture in El Salvador) is a unique coalition of NGOs that despite political differences have united forces with the common goal of advancing sustainable agriculture approaches for peasants in various areas of the country.

These initiatives (as discussed below) have been instrumental in expanding the CLADES vision through the region, and have also become key case studies from which to derive important lessons about disseminating sustainable agriculture and rural development.

1. Altieri, M.A. and O. Masera 1993. Sustainable Rural Development in Latin America: building from the bottom-up. Ecological Economics 7: 93-121.
1. Latin American Commission on Development and Environment 1990. Our Own Agenda. IADB-UNDP, New York. 52 pp.
1. Bebbington, A. et al. 1993. Non Government Organizations and the State in Latin America. Routledge, London.
1. Altieri, M.A. and A. Yurjevic 1989. The Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development (CLADES): a new institutional arrangement to foster sustainable agriculture among resource-poor farmers. Bulletin of the Institute of Development Anthropology 7: 17-20.