RIAC in the Sacred Valley of the Inca, Peru
Just one month ago the Red Internacional de Agroecología Comunitaria-Joven (RIAC-Joven), or the International Youth Network, arrived in one of the highest and most colorful regions of the world, the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru. For the first time since the pandemic RIAC youth convened in-person. While the altitude challenged our lungs, drinking the traditional medicinal herb Muña, a native mint leaf, soothed our altitude sickness making it possible to join communities in an early harvest and enjoy more than 20 potato dishes. Together we were a tapestry of nearly 100 youth and collaborators from the RIAC, Asociación ANDES, Red Indigenize (a network of Andean and Amazonian indigenous organizations) and CAN. This year, with support from Swift Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Agroecology Fund, Kellogg Foundation, McKnight Foundation and ongoing CAN supporters, we gathered as a broader network of indigenous, afro-descendent and campesino youth from 8 biocultural regions across the Americas to amplify how youth multiply land based knowledges and networks of life to defend communities from south to north. Stories, knowledge, and experiences bloomed from the acequia regions of the colorado high desert, the karst subtropical milpa soils of the Maya region, the Amazonian jungles of the Sarayaku and other communities, the highest Andean peaks holding Quechua lifeways, to the ribereño communities of Afro-Colombia, the migrant communities of coastal California, the coffee highlands in Central America and Mexico and all the way south to Patagonia.
A few months leading up to the Intercambio, RIAC and ANDES youth collaborated to co-organize 4 thematic areas to discuss: technology, climate change, agroecology, and the defense of home territories. Together, with ANDES & CAN, they focused on creating spaces of learning through storytelling, socio-dramas and experiential activities in Quechua-speaking communities as a way to delve deeper into solidarity economies, ancestral technologies, foodways, climate change, and community-based in situ genetic seed conservation.
This made this year’s intercambio distinct from other years as we drew from indigenous methodologies of horizontal learning, landscapes as cultural texts, and community learnings from ANDES’s two decades of work as well as CAN’s facilitation methods that engage community knowledge production and praxis through exchange.
Sharing knowledges
Socio-drama created and presented by youth to discuss technologies. Youth learning how potato is harvested locally.
As we moved among the sacred mountain guardians of the Apus, laced with ancient agricultural terraces and potato silos, the Andean landscape became our readings. Our integration into community quotidian activities became our school. We harvested potato, maize, and fava beans, and cooked our harvest along with meat and herbs, in an underground pit with hot stones, a traditional cooking method called Pachamanca. With each activity, inquiry and cross dialogue was generated. Through observing the vivid textiles woven from alpaca dyed with a rainbow of local native plants we understood how they are connected to the community care of the more than 1,500 local potato varieties in the Parque de la Papa (Potato Park). This agrobiodiversity is sustained not only in a seed house or dyed clothing but rather interconnected in a cultural and community landscape. As is true for the culinary sanctuary where we cooked the Pachamanca– the flavor and color of each ingredient conserves the biological and cultural knowledge of this region. Each space is interlinked with practices, land ethics, culture, cosmology, community organization, and agrobiodiversity. Sumaq kausay, or harmonious existence with the surrounding spirits, humans, wildlife and mountains, is at the center for Andean communities. Economy contributes to such spaces locally, and youth directly engage in trade and barter with and among the community markets of Lares, expanding their notions of value, solidarity, and reciprocity. This was followed by the sharing of CAN’s AgroEco solidarity supply network, an offering to analyze cross-regional trade networks, solidarity among communities, risk redistribution and an agroecological alternative to corporate coffee monopolies.
“Youth want the territories of indigenous peoples to be wholly conserved and where they can implement life plans within the framework of their economy.”
Our learnings found a multitude of perspectives and lifeworlds within the diversity of participants, each grounded in their own history, praxis, cosmologies and ecologies. When youth from an Amazonian community shared their main land-based livelihood strategies, hunting, practiced and connected to other facets of community organization and thought not in agricultural areas but within other forests zones, we were left with the questions that challenge the perceived notions that agroecological principles could by themselves support a dialogue of knowledges among a diversity of land-based livelihoods. How do we build new ways of understanding agroecology, ones that move beyond agro-centered notions of production to ones that integrate entire lifeways and territories, situating them in ways of knowing that may be sustained or revived? How do we uphold complex relationships and modes of relating beyond production and commodification?
Agroecology is a critical movement that provides an alternative to the agroindustrial model. In recent years more and more governments and corporations have begun to adopt agroecology, unfortunately creating packages and input substitution strategies often mirroring the green revolution. Critics call it cooptation and a strategy of development for advancing ‘agricultural modernity’ and another strategy of assimilation of indigenous territories or subsistence-based livelihood communities into a new so-called humanized ‘green economy’. Youth testimonies about how this is happening in their territories energized discussions about the defense of their home territories and the role of agroecology in these struggles. Indigenous youth shared how their ancestral forms of cultural organization, cosmology and autonomy are key to organizing their land based practices and knowledge that while some would call agroecological internally they refer to them in their customary vernaculars of milpa, chakra, acequia among others. In recent and more frequent instances, agroecology has become more and more of an imposition onto these vernaculars and lifeways often extracted from the holistic reality of their communities’ millennia of knowledge and the interconnection to territory and ceremony.
When an indigenous youth says that their community has experienced agroecology as an imposition, how do we listen thoughtfully to the questions this brings:
How can agroecology sustain movements that uphold plurality and uplifts the multiple ways of knowing embedded in each communities’ language, ecosystem, culture and political history?
Can agroecology continue to help us create new forms of solidarity across rural and urban, immigrants and locals, campesino and indigenous landscapes to collectively propel community autonomy and the building of many types of futures?
The critiques and questions of agroecology were not easy for youth fervently committed to its movement to hear. While agroecology is inspired by traditional forms of land stewardship, the dialogue among youth raised how it is critical to speak from and defend community vernaculars and ways of knowing locally. Vernaculars that are just as legitimate as what agroecology has built over the years as a science and practice. It will be the youth who begin work through these questions.
This year a main part of the RIAC exchange cocina compartida, where all youth cook regional and traditional dishes for each other, was followed by traditional dance in a Camaradería.
This convergence of youth committed to the defense of their cultural identities through the multiplying of foodways, seeds, and community life provides us with hope. Communities like those participating in the international youth exchange are examples that Sumak kausay can garner new forms to multiply land based knowledge and propel distinct proposals towards a pluriverse of agroecologies and the defense of land based communities. This hope and commitment permeated the youth exchange and erupted into nightly celebrations. We shared music, storytelling, community videos, dance, theatre, and poetry. We cooked our traditional foods for each other and created moments together to cultivate relationships and trust for the work ahead.
Stay connected for the upcoming publication of the International Youth Exchange Declaration, a statement of youth’s commitments and position resulting from a week long dialogue. To be published on June 21th 2024 initiating the Summer Solstice in all of CAN’s social media. Also look out for the International Youth Exchange ‘Memory Booklet’, a compilation of activities, fotos, videos and recipes designed by our close communication collaborators COMPAS Comunicación para la Sobernía. Come back to learn more directly from youth, ANDES, CAN, and invited guests about our learnings in a live webinar this upcoming Fall of 2024. Consider a donation to sustain this work!
