
Sowing Life (Sembrando Vida) is one of the programs that President Andrés Manuel has boasted about the most, and also one of the most questioned by environmental groups. Full of chiaroscuros and contradictions, this is a journey into its depths in the countryside of Chiapas.
Text: Leonardo Toledo
Photos: Duilio Rodríguez
SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, CHIAPAS.- “Everyone lies,” said Dr. House, and I think it is with that bad attitude that we must approach everything said about Sowing Life, a program that is many things full of contradictions: An ambitious reforestation plan without the participation of CONAFOR; building learning communities but is not part of SEP educational programs; it rebuilds the social fabric but is not in the security strategy; reinforces local markets but does not appear in big economic plans; combats climate change although it is criticized by environmental groups; building the path to food sovereignty outside of large rural development plans; it provides employment to professionals but does not respond to labor policy; it is a response strategy to the immigration problem without the batons of the National Migration Institute.
Everyone will have a different approach depending on where they stand and their personal trajectory: designers of the old and new programs; journalists who are sympathizers or paid by the 4T or its political rivals; specialists in forecasting catastrophes; free market fanatics; the urban population that defends its scholarships and subsidies while looking down on investment in the countryside; the rural chiefdom of all types that sees its clientele diminished; the tree seller; the banker who manages the funds and the one who stopped managing the funds…
So, you have to look at who says what and why he says it. The same data serves some to declare catastrophe and others to claim victory. The problem is knowing at what moment we stop asking and suspecting, at what moment we can say “it is this” without it becoming a process of denying reality.
This work is an approach to consider the available information in light of two questions: Good for whom? Bad for whom?
Save me from my saviors
The Chiapas campesinos have seen many saviors come and go. The encomenderos who took care of them and the missionaries who saved them in exchange for shiny rocks, unpaid work and sacks of food. The gum and rubber entrepreneurs who devastated the northern jungle, who hired their workers under deception and kept them for almost the entire year, but helped them by selling them intoxicating drinks on pay days.
After the revolution, new religions came to save them from their culture and teach them civilization. After them came the agronomists to teach them how to clear land (throw away the jungle and the forest, then) to plant improved grains that would later grow with fertilizers because that jungle soil cannot tolerate anything.
Then the revolutionaries arrived; the NGOs; the foundations; the innovators; those of Oportunidades; the conservationists; those of Procampo; the environmentalists; those of Progresa; agroecologists; the drug traffickers; agroecologists 1.2 and 1.3, ecotourists; carbon sequestrants; environmental educators; those who were against all of the above.
With each onslaught of saviors, the countryside became empty, people went to study or work in the cities, to work in the fields of the north, to the army, to seek their fortune with the gringos, to join the ranks of organized crime; to build Cancun…
Each generation that arrives says that the previous ones did it wrong.
The truth is that the Chiapas countryside has seen public policies of all kinds pass, which have promised to “lift its inhabitants out of poverty” without success, but which have enriched or benefited its operators.
The saddest forestry policy was the punitive one. Thousands of jungle dwellers were forcibly evicted, forced to survive in wild places, pushed to find means of subsistence outside the law and persecuted for it. Then they decided to involve them with dozens of training workshops for different conservation tasks, but the job calls never appeared. The worst was the persecution of illegal logging. While we saw trucks and trucks loaded with huge logs passing by heading to the clandestine sawmill, the CONAFOR sheriffs detained the neighbor who had pruned his fruit tree. Leticia Merino reported in March 2018 that while Profepa seizures reached 30 thousand cubic meters of wood, illegal logging had illegally extracted 14 million cubic meters.
When the idea that jungles and forests were “idle lands” was abandoned, the discourse changed and “reforestation campaigns” began. Every year we saw presidents, governors, municipal presidents, deputies and businessmen passing by announcing a great reforestation: they carried their little tree, took a photo lifting the shovel and then posed again next to the already planted tree. In the end they left and left thousands of small trees at the mercy of the sun, wind, rain, cows, goats, pests… the good thing was that the next cycle they could return to the same land and plant trees again and take photos.
How can we forget Felipe Calderón’s ProÁrbol program that promised to plant a billion trees! I don’t know if they planted the billion, but later it was reported that of all those who planted, only 10 percent survived.
Along with those 900 million dead trees, 2,430 million pesos also went to the coffers of the nursery owners. For the report they said that they had registered 118 thousand beneficiaries, but they only gave the resource to half. They promised to reforest 561 thousand hectares, although they only reported 400 thousand hectares, but it turned out that there had only been 361 thousand, that is, 200 thousand less than promised. The culmination of this great reforestation feat was when the Superior Audit of the Federation observed that thousands of trees had been reported (tendered, purchased, invoiced) but were not planted anywhere. The director of CONAFOR said that it was a “virtual reforestation” and added “that does not mean that we have not complied.”
Sowing Life
Sowing Life focuses on two problems: rural poverty and environmental degradation. In the plan, it seeks to improve the quality of life of the families that participate by improving their income, diversifying their productive practices, strengthening and expanding their markets, promoting organic agriculture, and, to a certain extent, rebuilding what they call the social fabric. At the same time, it involves the rural population in the environmental discussion, not only as an instrument or a hindrance but as players and decision makers.
For planters, the first thing is to have a two and a half hectare plot of land. In exchange for 6,250 pesos a month, they agree to plant different types of trees and plants in those two and a half hectares, not just fruit trees as they say, because one of the jokes is that there is a diversity of crops. Then they must plant timber or fruit trees (mahogany, cedar, rubber, cocoa, mango, pepper, cinnamon), but also plant other things such as shrubs and cacti (chili, pitaya, agave) and then combine all that with milpa (usually corn, beans and pumpkin, although they can be other combinations) using a method developed by Mexican researchers known by the acronym MIAF (milpa intercropped in fruit trees) that implies better use of water, soil conservation with “filters” made with the branches and stubble obtained from the same plot, in addition to promoting the planting of native corn.
But the thing doesn’t end there. Together with 25 other farmers from the same region, they come together in a FLC (Farmer Learning Community) where they collectively build agreements and learning, from workshops given by technicians on fertilizer production through organic processes, to definitions of the products that will be taken to meetings between producers from different regions. After a first delivery of seeds and trees that is covered by the Secretariat, they must build a nursery that will be used to introduce new trees, replace those that cannot grow and, in the future, they will also be able to market them. These nurseries are managed by the FLC and are established in a space owned by one of the 25.
It is important to highlight the importance of this new player in the programs aimed at the countryside: the “social” technicians, who according to the official definition are in charge of “promoting the well-being of the community by promoting relationships of cooperation, harmony and co-responsibility.” That is, they are responsible for obtaining and systematizing data on planters and plots, in addition to contributing to the learning and collaboration processes within the Community.
Their presence will be important when the plots have regular production, to form cooperatives derived from the FLCs and build marketing strategies for local markets.
All this in a state dominated by extensive livestock farming, monocultures of African palm, rubber (and in some areas, poppy). In addition to a highly volatile situation, with territorial and political conflicts everywhere, an armed conflict that has been going on for 30 years without a satisfactory solution in sight. As if that were not enough, with an ancient practice of clientelism and welfare that has deeply rooted dynamics both in public officials with high levels of corruption and in large groups of farmers, especially when organizations used to managing resources and simulating results are involved.
The critics
When the journey that led me to write this text began, I went to look for several people who know the subject of the field, experts that I have met here and there for whom I profess friendship, admiration and respect. I asked them to tell me what I should look for, what I should focus on. Where is the corruption? Who is winning with Sowing Life? These were some of their responses:
—The most obvious thing is that they are deforesting, people get rid of their trees in order to enter the program.
—To give it a budget they left many programs that already existed, such as Proárbol, without funds. Almost everything that CONAFOR did is now immobilized, the programs that were purely forestry were abandoned for this one that is not necessarily going to recover or restore the forests.
—It destructures local organizational forms, its procedures do not take into account the positions and ways of each place, they pass over them.
—It does not have a gender perspective, there is nothing in the rules that incorporates gender policies.
—Everything is aimed at promoting land reconversion practices, focusing on timber for export.
—The real winner is Romo, they are buying all the trees from his nursery in Tapachula.
A few years ago, the international organization SIPAZ (International Service for Peace-Chiapas) published a good article that recovers several of the criticisms that have been made from this place:
Gustavo Sánchez, from the Mocaf Network:
“The provision of support to ejidatarios in an individualistic manner can generate division, break the social fabric and aggravate the situation of violence and insecurity against community leaders, defenders of the land and the environment, and uncovered historical problems in land ownership in the country in addition to generating family disputes over who is the ‘legal’ owner of the land.”
René Gómez, president of the organization “Forests and Governance”, in Ocosingo, Chiapas:
“If a farmer has two and a half hectares, but only one is deforested, what he does is cut down the other hectare and a half so that they complete the quota requested by the government. The technicians and authorities responsible for Sowing Life have instructions not to include in the program plots that have been established by demolishing jungle or forest, but at least in some cases they were included in the program given that the program lacks a monitoring system to carry it out it.”
Other Worlds Chiapas Organization:
“These programs, created from an alien vision of the forest and the countryside, do not adapt to the reality of the people nor do they even seek their well-being. Rather, they are programs that seek to maintain an extractivist system, so that the production of goods at all costs and the accumulation of capital by a few corporate networks can continue to be justified. At the same time, these programs leave the peasantry and indigenous peoples in a situation of wage slaves on their own lands, chained through contracts and criminalized when they decide to return to treating the land as their grandfathers and grandmothers did before, and regain control on common goods.”
In another publication from 2022, reviewed in Avispa Midia “Community and Autonomy against Sowing Life”, the director of CECCAM, Ana de Ita, highlighted the following:
“The Sowing Life program is intentionally undermining these structures [community and ejidal assemblies] that allow communities a certain degree of autonomy.”
“In regions where the program operates, an increase in luxury consumption has been noted, for example, of canned beer, since there are not many alternatives for consumption of other goods in rural communities: health, education, culture, food, etc. and what is closest at hand is junk consumption.’’
“On the common lands that the ejido gives for a period of time to farmers who do not have it, fruit and timber trees will be planted that will be in production when the program ends, thus it will be very difficult for that land to become of common use in the agrarian core.’’
“By not taking into account the agrarian authorities, the forms of organization in the countryside, the systems of positions, the forms of collective work, the ways of making decisions and by not addressing the peasant agrarian nuclei, as collective owners of the land, but to individuals and to select some and not others, at the end of the six-year term the program will not make any difference, neither in the reduction of poverty, nor in reforestation and care for the forest.’’
Original article by Leonardo Toledo at Pie de Página, July 14, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.