RIAC: A Swarm of Youth Knowledges
“While there are fires used to harm, there are also fires that feed and regenerate.”
This year RIAC youth and CAN celebrated our 11th International Youth Exchange in Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in Peru. After 13 years youth representatives from cooperatives, collectives, and farming communities uphold a solid learning network. The RIAC organizes across borders to share agroecological knowledge and practice, foment intercultural dialogue, and confront all forms of the agroindustrial food system’s threats to land based livelihoods and the environment.
New and ongoing reflections open conversations in our monthly virtual gatherings while in-person meetings, intercambios, deepen dialogue and focus our study of land and campesino organization. CAN accompanies RIAC youth by co-facilitating inquiries about challenges arising in each of their home territories. We support by provoking further reflection about global structural problems visibly manifesting in local communities and working with youth to find community based action deriving from their agro-food systems. This is how CAN & RIAC youth multiply the swarm of life.
In preparation for the 2024 Intercambio, RIAC youth organized a pre-encounter focused on fire. Students from the Universidad Intercultural Maya Quintana Roo, Mexico (UIMQROO), shared their research and knowledge on the use of fire, a polemic topic in milpa farming that is often shunned by agricultural extension agents. Yet, fire is an ancestral technology and intrinsic part of Maya culture and regional ecology, one that as youth share, is used to prepare the land for planting. Fire is a cultural element that holds a source of vital energy for the management of soils and nutrients and holds an important relationship in the worldview of the Maya peoples.
As a Maya campesina youth and RIAC member explained:
“When we use fire in the forest, the campesinos do not see fire as something bad, because we have the help of the wind and water, in this way fire is not dangerous. When we burn, we all go to the forest very early and make the path for the fire. With the help of rakes and machetes, the forest path is cleared. It is the campesino knowledge that can stop the fire, and it is so beautiful. I see fire making curves, but the fire also stops. Living and relating to fire is important.”
And indeed it can be, as many of us living in fire prone California have come to understand the importance of Native American fire management of coastal sage scrub and local forests to regenerate these ecosystems.
CAN facilitated this dialogue leading to a collective analysis through intercultural listening. Together, we identified how technocratic recommendations for landscape management are often used to advance agroindustrial capital leaving dialogues between elemental relationships and soil care to the sidelines. We learned from Nicaraguan campesino youth how their community’s fire knowledge historically used to clear small plots of land was suppressed. Green Revolution technology replaced the traditional use of fire with freely distributed chemical herbicides as a way to clear herbaceous early succession plants in their farming systems. Campesino communities became dependent on these agrochemicals.
“Our struggle became to actively transition our communities out of this dependency.”
As youth continued to share from their experiences, they highlighted that agrochemicals are produced through the burning of fossil fuels, a negative manipulation of fire, a fire energy used to destroy plants, soils, health and the atmosphere. We concluded
“While there are fires used to harm, there are also fires that feed and regenerate.”
Through this dialogue, the ancestral management of fire became a practice to study for youth, evidencing and recognizing the legacy of their customs and culture, rescuing ancestral knowledge and traditional practices. From here, agroecological innovation or restoration can grow. These dialogues lead us to question more clearly the industrial practices that seek to strip land-based people of their ecological practices to care for Mother Earth, and the subsequent forces that push for the use of agrochemicals, clearing cutting of forests, planting of commercial monocultures, mining, and even war, as development strategies. These we say are “Practices that violate the dignified life of campesino communities and youth by making our agri-food systems vulnerable and displaced, unable to regenerate healthy foods, ecological conditions or community knowledge while magnifying soil and waterways contamination, consequences of the climate crisis.”
Youth Knowledge and Organization Nurtures the Swarm of Life!
Together we multiply knowledge that feeds and restores life in the soil. We multiply practices and bring other methodologies that seek to connect life forms and understand the world, weaving connections from other ways of cultivating and caring for Mother Earth.
