Interview with Francisca Rodriguez - Via Campesina's seed campaign

GRAIN: Tell us a bit about who you are.
FR: I am a woman with a strong vocation for working for women. My family were campesinos, small farmers, and the desire to be near rural and women farmers comes from there. My first jobs and social relations were within the rural environment; I married a farmers' leader. After the military coup in Chile.1 I went to work with the Ranquil Confederation, a family farm federation that existed at the time of the coup.
There I began this work with women, and I had to arrange my activities to fit in with my home life and my children. This was challenging, because there were financial pressures and I worked in the fields as well, first as a seasonal labourer and then growing flowers. But the experience was very important for me. I learned a lot at the side of the men who ran the organisation at that time. I learned the importance of inter-organisational ties and international relationships, and it taught me something extraordinarily important: the value of being Latin American. When you work at that level, you stop being Chilean and become “latina”, which greatly strengthened my formative experience.
GRAIN: How did you get involved in Via Campesina?
FR:I was one of the 60-80 people present at the founding of Vía Campesina, as the representative of a Chilean family farming federation, la Federación Surco Campesino. As a result of the fall of socialism and the weakening of international organisations, a lot of people were asking themselves how to keep moving forward. At the time of the campaign against 500 years of Latin American colonisation there was great enthusiasm to mobilise a resistance movement. A call went up to establish a movimiento campesino, a family farm movement. The call to begin this adventure was an invitation to create an alternative to the existing economic model, wherein we, as campesinos, would create the new structure. It was irresistible.
When we met in Belgium to debate the principles of the new organisation, we realised that ours would be an organisation based on objectives and principles, rather than statutes and structures. Our challenge was to build the road, or way (Vía) that was an alternative to the prevailing economic model, and that is why we called it Vía Campesina. This is an elementary fact that we should not forget: we are family farmers building an alternative way. And we have been doing just that. Not only have we introduced important statements and concepts, such as Food Sovereignty, but these are tied to action. For example, our presence at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial meeting in Seattle: this was organised participation that showed the possibility of building a movement collectively.
Vía Campesina is an organisation that does not have much in the way of structures or formalities, but which is now more recognised in each country than more formal international organisations. Maybe that is because the campaigns are tightly woven into the concerns of family farmers, which is why nobody feels left out. Furthermore, this is a movement of very plain men and women. There is no one great personality, but all of the associates are people with much valuable experience.
GRAIN: What role do campaigns play in Vía Campesina?
FR: There have been three defining moments in Vía Campesina. The first was when we defined the concept of Food Sovereignty and developed a campaign around it. This was a tool to defend and strengthen our rights, and it confronted the WTO. Our most important struggles have been directed at the WTO, to keep it out of agriculture, so that the WTO neither defines the social relationships involved in agriculture, nor the ways of doing it.
Food Sovereignty led us to our first campaign, which we defined as the struggle for genuine agrarian reform. At the outset, we didn´t understand the full magnitude of what this implied, but as we moved ahead with making concrete our expression of Food Sovereignty, our concept of agrarian reform also expanded. Now it is not just the struggle for land, it is also a matter of producing food that the country needs, and the right to decide what kind of agriculture we want.
The second important step was the beginning of the debate about the seeds campaign. We recognised that family farming must have a future, that we would have no rôle if it dies out. So our campaign includes not only family farmers and native peoples but also the entire social framework. We have made an important jump by stating that agriculture is not simply a problem for the family farmer, but for each country as a whole.
The third important step taken by Vía Campesina was to develop an integrative proposal involving women and young people, family farmers' know-how and wisdom, and what we could call institutional know-how. I think that this holistic approach guarantees the life of VC's member organisations, gives them meaning, pulling them out of their shells and projecting them. It also allows Vía Campesina to relate to other organisations and build a collective process.
GRAIN: What is the specific contribution of the seed campaign?
FR: The seed campaign has deep meaning for farmers and indigenous peoples, and it gives a prominent role to women. It strengthens the concept of Food Sovereignty and transforms it into a commitment to action. The campaign helps integrate the various aspects of agriculture, but also weaves in issues related to labour, value systems and campesina culture. That returns some of our humanity to us, providing strength to face the hardship involved in all of this. Agriculture has been transforming us into machines that work harder than before, suppressing the creativity that used to characterise the farming process. Technology subjugates and annihilates people, and knowledge at the service of capital dehumanises science. How do we stop this all encompassing madness, which leads to extermination instead of progress? When I look at the seed campaign, being part of Vía Campesina makes more sense: building this alternative way. I see the campaign as part of that great road that we are building around the world.

GRAIN: What role do you see women playing in it?
FR:The main role! Women have made tremendous progress in the movement. Agrarian reform and economic changes have made many men leave farming so that women take on a more visible economic role (we have always played an important part, but now it shows more). Women have assumed leadership in the campaign, and we are also giving greater visibility to our specific contribution to family farming.

GRAIN: Have there been any dissenters among the groups involved in the campaign?
FR:Not that I know of. I have heard some skepticism, like we are advocating a return to the past. I have only heard that from men – not women – and particularly from associates in Europe and North America, where family farms have been hardest hit by the economic model. They say that knowledge has been lost and that the work is hard, that it takes a long time, and that it was possible in the past because the whole family was involved. There are men who say that they have lost the ability to select, store and take care of seed. They describe a notable loss of knowledge, and more than anything a loss of self confidence. With the women it is different: when the subject is mentioned, they pick up on it and begin to reflect on it. Generally, the men's skepticism dies away when the subject is debated within the family, because men want to deny it, but women have answers and reasons to show that they are wrong. Women act as the memory for many men. As heads of the family, men are the ones who respond to the technical assistance programs and the training activities related to new farming techniques, and are more influenced by all of that.
GRAIN: Does the campaign have the potential to rebuild knowledge or rebuild the family?
FR: We cannot claim that the campaign is going to provide complete salvation from this crisis nor the break-downs that affect farm life, but it is going to help. The changes will happen over a long period of time: the campaign will be long. For example, if food is a major focus, the campaign will become a campaign of tremendous political significance. It will be mutually supporting and feed itself, because the effects on the general population will have important repercussions in the countryside. This is a campaign for everyone.
GRAIN: What activities are being carried out now?
FR: We are in the process of raising the general level of consciousness, but we are also raising our own levels of sensitivity. We are spreading our message abroad, and what is wonderful is that we are spreading it through action. Every new thing that we recover or discover, we are communicating to the world immediately. It doesn´t stay enclosed within our homes and our organisations, it is being broadcast like seed. As we unravel the causes of the abuse and oppression that we have suffered, the campaign will continue to broaden.
This will be a campaign that brings hope. There has been more resistance than we thought, and this has been more important than we could see. When we see what men and women have been doing in different countries, things are going to become much easier. People feel the need to share what they know, because sharing knowledge means self-esteem. Our knowledge and wisdom were always stifled because we were considered ignorant and backwards. Today we know that on the contrary, we are very advanced, and that helps us to recover our knowledge.
Our primary activities are seed exchanges and fairs, but it is very important that we recover popular research. Together with the other activities, we have to prepare popular researchers. We, native peoples and campesinos, have to do the research ourselves in order to recover. But recover for what? There are strong and diverse vested interests regarding knowledge, and we must be very clear about this. Too many researchers are sheep in wolves' clothing. We need our own researchers to know what has been stolen from us, and that information has to be published and spread. And as part of this campaign we have to feel a lot of rage - not impotence - because rage means that we will not longer tolerate what has been done to us, that we are not going to stand for it anymore. To do that we have to know what was taken from us, who took it, and why.
GRAIN: This is a campaign for everyone and led by camp-esinos. What role do you see for other social organisations or NGOs?
FR: The campaign is led by campesinos and took off from a family farming knowledge base that we do not want to see die. For the rest of the people there is a very important role: to understand, to become conscious. People have to understand how far this newly imposed food system has taken us, what we have lost and how that affects us. Family farmers are defending their trade. It is our mission on Earth, that we enjoy, that provides our lives with fulfillment. Just as a doctor would want his child to become a doctor, our trade is just as noble, just as important, and we would like to see it continue with our children, so that the cycle is not broken. Our occupation is productive and people have to know the value of food, that it has to do with quality of life and with national interests. That is why it is a campaign for everyone.
The trade of family farmers should be valued. That value has always been recognised and that is why many people have tried to take advantage of it, although nowadays such behaviour is more perverse than before. That consciousness led to slavery, to the creation of large farms, and is the reason why we have been isolated and treated like animals that are needed to do the work. Those who have run society have presented us as fools and they laugh at us. But behind that are vested economic interests that must be understood, and so this campaign has to create new relationships between the rural and urban worlds.
GRAIN: Meaning that in the non-campesino sector we have a great deal to learn?
FR: Yes, but you also have important know-how and wisdom to contribute. There´s a need for collective creativity. We have to think about how to broadcast the message and how to generate, together, a feeling of rebellion. Because what will happen if we recover our seeds and we keep working and planting, but people continue to buy junk food and continue to feel that what is imported from abroad is better than what we have here? This is a question of generating conscientiousness on both sides. As our associates of Movimento dos Sem Terra (Landless Farmers Movement) have said, this process is part of the creation of new men and women – the foundations of a new society. No wrong lasts a hundred years. Nothing is irreversible, although we are told that it is, and the free trade agreements affirm that it is. We have the strength of the majority. All the processes are evolving and depend upon everyone achieving conscientiousness.