First weeks at the Escuela Campesina

In my first few weeks in Nicaragua, I have been living, learning, and working at the Escuela Obrera Campesina Internacional Francisco Morazán outside of the city center of Managua.  This school is just one of the many hubs of activity of the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) throughout Nicaragua.

Entrance to the school

The ATC works to protect the rights of rural peasant farmers and farmworkers throughout Nicaragua.  It has had a strong presence in the country since the days of the Sandanista revolution and continues to work to defend social gains that have been made for the rural poor.  It operates through unions, cooperatives, popular education, and social movement building, with regular gatherings and trainings for members. 

While the ATC has a long history in Nicaragua, it also has a long history working on the global level as a founding member of La Via Campesina (LVC).  LVC is constructed of 180 organizations representing 79 countries throughout the globe.  The movement grew out of a resistance against neo-liberalism and agribusiness which produces monoculture crops for export, creates dependencies on synthetic inputs and genetically modified seeds, damages the health and economies of local communities, and destroys the planet.  LVC was a leader in developing the concept of food sovereignty which asserts that small-scale, sustainable agriculture and foodways, where rural producers and workers maintain control over their production, is the real way to feed the world.  Food sovereignty strongly values historical knowledge, agrarian reform, culturally appropriate foods, local consumption, and gender equity.

For many years, the ATC has focused on activities such as unions and farmworker rights because many of its members lacked legal access to significant amounts of land for self-production of food (and were instead working on others’ land).  However, more recently, the ATC has integrated into its work a focus on agroecology, a form of agriculture that fits with LVC’s guiding principle of food sovereignty.  Agroecology is a response to conventional industrial agriculture that focuses on low-input, diversified systems that can feed people (and has fed people for centuries).  As LVC’s recent statement from the International Forum on Agroecology asserts, agroecology is more than just a production system: it is a set of principles that “can and are practiced in many different ways, with each sector contributing their own colors of their local reality and culture, while always respecting Mother Earth and our common, shared values."

Being here at the Escuela Campesina has brought to life for me what the La Via Campesina movement can look like in reality, as I have been able to observe some of the activities that go on here day in and day out.  

Workshop in progress (flags from LVC Central America member orgs on ceiling)

Ending just a few days ago was a 10-day leadership formation course for young and old campesinos and campesinas from Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica.  Workshop topics included history of colonization in Latin America, political theory (in particular Marxism), food sovereignty, La Via Campesina, popular education, gender, agroecology, worldview, and communication.  I was able to sit in on some parts of the course to get a sense of how ATC education works and learn some new things.  One highlight of the course was having an expert on medicinal plants come and give a workshop, which included bringing to life again an area of the school grounds that was dedicated to medicinal plants in the past.

Medicinal plant area before

Workshop participants learned about medicinal plants...

...then planted them!

more planting

Medicinal plant garden after

In addition to spending time in this leadership formation course, I have been working with other folks here in envisioning how the Escuela Campesina can be more of a production demonstration space.  I’ve been doing some work in the food and medicinal plant gardens and there is hope to integrate and re-integrate other production aspects such as propagation.  I’m learning about some tropical plants that are new to me which is cool.  Doing just a little bit of garden work makes me miss my work previous seasons on farms in Oregon and Ohio.  I am also reminded of how much more I want to learn about all sorts of plants.  

Learning plant propagation with aloe vera!

I'm always taking notes.

Little garden of corn, squash, and beans

Yerba buena

Albahaca china

We transplanted a type of rare bean plant that we hope to use to save seed.

While I work from the Escuela Campesina, much of the ATC team is hard at work on finalizing a proposal to construct the IALA Mesoamerica, or the Latin American Institute of Agroecology.  I hope to write more about this project for you all while I am in Nicaragua.  Stay tuned.