Ana Cristina Soprani, 31 anos (Farias/Linhares)
(See more from Cristina in Part 4)
Cristina is an industrious farmer and mother of three children who works on her family land in Farias. She and her partner, Elias (see Part 3) are active in the Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA). Her family has struggled years of repression from the eucalyptus plantation companies.
“Resistance in this context is not something very simple and today we have a great social contradiction. There is a policy for every incentive given to agribusiness, monocultures for large-scale production as well as to use chemical poisons, and fertilizers. But to produce crops in a natural way, there is a block. While I understand that there is a real need for conservation and preservation, but securing a public policy for this type of farming which we call agroecology, is still a challenge. However within this challenge, we ask two important questions: one is the producing in a natural way without poisons, and another challenge is the marketing of this production.
Here in our region, some families have been able to overcome these challenges but they are not easy. Our family, for example, has been fighting for 10 years to make a clean production on our property and we are still in a process, we can not totally get rid of chemicals, but we believe we are very close. We do not use any kind of poison on our crops. We still use a little chemical fertilizer but a smaller dose than before. Today we have a marketing proposal that we consider extremely important that includes an alliance of rural and city workers that work in the markets.
Previously to lived with the idea that we produced everything, all the food, meat, everything we needed to survive with dignity. We also did not have much money, that’s a fact, not many had access to things like clean water, energy, or a computer … that didn’t exist. But families lived with dignity. With the advent of the green revolution, my father says that roughly in the ’80s when agronomists came here, they said: “Mr. Domingos, if you continue producing this coffee without chemical fertilizers, we have no way to sell your coffee.” Then he began to use chemical fertilizers and poisons. There was a large incentive to be involved in the so-called “modernization” of agriculture.
Only this modernization was not for us. What has this brought us? A dependence on chemicals, fertilizers, poison, monoculture, because in order to be modern, you could not produce everything, even the food would be bought at the supermarket. You had to buy it! So it created an illusion that the “modern” was very good and the government at the time very much encouraged this, including those who used apparatuses of the State for technical assistance to come to the field, to make farmers believe the fact that modern agriculture would be important in the countryside.
What happened was that farmers no longer produce food instead they produced monocultures with chemicals. This generated a false illusion that there was a lot of money. But actually, the money began circulating and then this money was reinvested to buy more poison, fertilizer and to buy food and medicine. But before we had teas and others who produced this, but this culture was destroyed too so now we have to buy the medicine and you can see that the people are sicker now than before, because people poison themselves in the fields and we also eat the poisoned food without knowing where it comes from. So the idea that modern would be good, created a stigma in the minds of people and the farmers themselves have come to believe that it was natural, it was natural to buy food, which produced the idea that chemicals are natural.
Eventually we have forgotten some of the traditional forms of production; to observe the moon phases, to observe the type of soil, and types of seeds. Seeds were something essential for handling in this culture. Agronomists came with “improved” seeds that we could plant and have a much larger production. Except that oddly enough, these seeds do not reproduce. Before you planted once and then you could grow them again, now you have to go the store and buy seeds again. So we ended up losing what we had which was so important, the control of our native seeds. The amount of money we have spent to invest in the purchase of seeds, poisons, fertilizer, medicine and food, has become a very strong vicious circle.
Many farmers believe to this day that this circle is natural because they are thinking in a modern condition. We began participating in a social organization a few years ago, the MPA (Movement of Small Farmers), an organization that realizes that we have entered a vicious circle and that we have not necessarily been in it to be modern. We become servants on our own lands, working for multinationals. We discovered that, which was not very easy. We began to see that we have no more control over our production. We realized that if we organized we could break this vicious circle, which was very painful because it requires an entire reconstruction of the soil that is already worn out because of the use of chemicals, and requires labor to produce again with diversity.
In conventional agriculture, with monocultures, a man with the chemicals makes the crop production. In traditional agriculture it is different, the whole family is involved in the process: a child will collect wood, the wife takes care of the garden and the foods that are around the house, the husband goes to weed the beans, there are several types of jobs that involve the whole family. In the process of conventional agriculture, the whole family was excluded.
Reversing this is not easy and even requires a lot of studying and takes practice. I would say today the “modernization” is to produce naturally. Being modern today is to understand the moon phases, when to plant roots or lettuce … it is to understand how to make a syrup so you do not need to use chemicals in the fields. Modernizing today is much more than the conventional package from Monsanto or Bayer. We now understand that to be modern and be freed from multinational companies that we need to move towards food production.
So today we have a very diversified production and we have made a very important relationship with the city workers. We work to produce healthy food for the working class that do not have access to these foods in the cities. We produce primarily to feed people, but also produce for other workers. We do not want to have a green stamp to sell at five times the price to the bourgeoisie – that is the difference.”