Resistance and food sovereignty: Mexican indigenous and peasant populations vs expanding agro-industry

1. Mexican communities and their relationship with land and territory. In August and September 2023, we travelled through various regions of Mexico in order to gain a deeper understanding of the outlook and realities of regional communities. During this time, we were surprised by the prevalence of ancestral peasant farming in some enclaves and, elsewhere, by farming methods based on agrochemicals and the commercial sowing of maize. Both coexist, while companies roll out their export monocultures in the open air or in ever more greenhouses consuming large amounts of water.

Ancestral peasant farming is not on the brink of extinction, or even in decline, but it is being backed into a corner. What’s more, official propaganda, government agencies, academia and corporate campaigns are not the only ones bent on undermining this age-old mutual nurturing.

Communities maintain their relationship with the land, “they are rooted in it, they live off it and on it, they communicate with it and they take care of it.”[1] There is a chasm between these traditional peasant communities – almost all of whom are descended from indigenous populations – and the commercial farming sector that calculates costs and benefits, buys machinery and chemicals, and is listed on the Chicago Stock Exchange, even if the companies do not export.

This happens all over the world, but in Latin America the relationship between life and the sowing of seeds, between communities and the immediate environment, is especially clear. This relationship is the basis of various acts of nurturing, within short or longer cycles.

“We have sown seeds since time immemorial, producing our own food while taking care of our family and community, and this gives us a unique perspective on work, social relations, space and time. Peasant farmers value community, and our relationship with the land is a collective one. The conversation around growing maize is also collective. To a large extent, anyone who grows their own food does not need to work for those who exploit their labour. Our intricate relationship with sowing seeds creates life on a daily basis and increases our awareness of a host of signs. Within every stage of our cultivation work, minute cycles are completed that bring order and meaning to lengthier, greater cycles, such as that of the sun over the course of the year, weaving together seasons, weather, humidity. We peasant farmers see details that people in the cities do not. Being growers, being peasant farmers, is a complete, collective, community-based spirituality that pits us directly against the systems that seek to impose so many forms of interaction on us.”[2]

Amid the disorder of today’s world, these ancestral ways of the peasant communities are under attack on an unprecedented scale. This was first exacerbated by the Green Revolution and the disempowerment enacted by international and national agencies and large corporations on traditional farming communities. Their methods are scorned, marginalised and even banned, while laboratory-grown seeds and a whole catalogue of fertilisers and pest control are forced upon them.

If we add to that the increasing and at times violent land-grabbing, deforestation and the government’s reluctance to offer support, it is surprising that peasant farming is alive at all. But it lives on.

Several communities maintain their life prospects through migration. Peasant farmers have managed to survive after centuries of marginalisation by remaining open to jobs in other areas, as day labourers or, in the cities, as builders, gardeners, garbage collectors or restaurant workers. Those who farm commercially lack this versatility and the rigour and care of those in today’s world of peasant farming.

2. This way of life is not merely a way to “navigate collapse”: it is simply what they have always done. Peasant farming, which today contributes to the instrumental possibilities of an agroecology, is not merely an alternative, a way to navigate the collapse brought about by the Green Revolution. It is the same kind of farming that is still practised with great devotion in many enclaves, but which seeks to shake off the doom and gloom promoted by various extensionists.

People are already starting to reject the illegitimate seeds included in the technical assistance promoted by businesses and government agencies.

Agroecology seems to function as a lens that focuses on the living memory of traditional farming, together with the knowledge and experience gathered from various fields. But, above all, it is the recognition of a wholesome way of life that requires the basic conditions of respect, equity and autonomy to ensure that the work and future of peasant farmers are unimpacted.

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (TPP), a grassroots tribunal active in every corner of the world and a constant in this national exercise of listening (embarked upon by various organisations and countless communities in their regions), took place in Mexico between 2011 and 2014. It was a vindication of peasant farming as a fundamental part of peoples’ life and culture, something inalienable that gives them a sense of identity and purpose.

In Mexico in particular, although we know that throughout Latin America it’s also the case, this has recently been the basis of the defence of native maize against transgenic versions, and against its covert or explicit privatisation. However, what was crucial and systematic in the approach of the TPP was its comprehensive defence of the peasant way of life. In the different regions, people shared what they had established locally. Not only did this represent their own participatory diagnosis, but also their active commitment to reclaiming their identity and historic status. From La Península, Tepoztlán and Huasteca, to Oaxaca and the Lerma river basin, in its final session entitled In the Shadow of Ayotzinapa, opinions were woven together between the jurors and the people, until the day of the final session. In his speech at the pre-hearing on maize in Oaxaca, Joel Aquino said:

“To lose the native maize, the food of our peoples, is to lose our autonomy. This is the heart of the matter. In a centuries-long struggle, communities have succeeded in strengthening their autonomy and building their own ways of life and governance. In Oaxaca, as was underlined in the presentations, ‘communality continues to be practised and strengthened’. It has achieved solid levels of self-sufficiency and has enabled effective food sovereignty. This entire construction is based on maize. Every family, every community, every region strives to produce enough maize for daily consumption.”[3]

During GRAIN’s tour in August 2023, in one very case in Mexico – in none other than San Isidro, Jalisco, which for years has struggled to reclaim its land, which has been invaded by a huge transnational corporation, Nutrilite, a subsidiary of AMWAY – the communities put forward their accusations and established a general context:

“...we claim that the conditions imposed between the State and the corporations prevent us from resolving by ourselves what fundamentally concerns us, our livelihood, and everything that gives us personal and common sense. They prevent us from defending the territory that we claim: the environment for the recreation and transformation of our existence: the space to which we give whole meaning through our shared knowledge. Without this knowledge, as the elders of the communities rightly say, the territories would be no more than sites, no more than landscapes.

As such, they are attacking us by seeking to hamper our connections to our historically close understanding of a space, to our lands, to water, to the forest, to our seeds, to our ways of being born and giving birth and caring for birth, to our ways of growing, to our ways of healing, to our understanding of food, to our freedom of movement and our life together as a community.”[4]

At the San Isidro session, many communities from the region (and from other regions that gathered there to air their grievances) stressed “the pollution, disease and death of the Santiago River and the devastation and destruction of sources of subsistence”, as in El Salto. The destruction and stigmatisation of peasant life by state, corporate and social spheres, as in Palos Altos; the comprehensive attack on the territory and rights of the indigenous community of Mezcala, the privatisation of its common land and the contamination of the lake water. In Santa Cruz de las Flores, Tlajomulco, the complaint relates to the excessive urbanisation, over-exploitation of water and the pressure put on various residents “to change the use of the land and to vacate”. In San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán in the Wixárika territory, “the dispossession and deterioration of ancestral territory due to hydrological environmental services programmes, the construction of highways for industrial corridors, water concessions to establish mining and logging projects, attacks on native maize by government programmes, as well as the dismantling of the assembly and of community organisation, all add up to the non-recognition of the community’s collective rights.”

In the ejido La Ciénega, in the municipality of El Limón, the grievance was “the dismantling of the ejidal assembly through the PROCEDE programme (for the individualisation of land property), the erosion of land by tequila companies, the loss of biodiversity of species such as the guamúchil and huaje, the introduction of technological product packages of agrochemicals and transgenic seeds, the exploitation of peoples and attacks on food sovereignty. Their stance was one in defence of seeds, peasant life and agriculture as a way of life, free from agrotoxins.

“Repressive mechanisms of corruption and co-optation of authorities and community assemblies for the dispossession of land, mountains and water (namely for the Toluca-Naucalpan highway project), for the benefit of industrialists and private individuals from the centre of the country,” are echoed by many communities in other neighbouring states, as in San Francisco Xochicuautla. “The dispossession and pollution of the territory by the transnational company Amway and its subsidiary in Mexico, Nutrilite, has meant the systematic non-compliance of judicial resolutions ordering the restitution of ejido lands by the federal authorities, environmental devastation, and the disintegration of families and communities. People who demand compliance with resolutions and the exercise of justice are criminalised and incarcerated,” as in San Isidro itself, while concerns are raised as to “the integrity of the community in the context of the drug trafficking conflict and the clandestine logging of its forests, as well as the destruction of the community assembly and the loss of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and biodiversity,” as in Cheranástico in neighbouring Michoacán, which is also one of the booming avocado-growing areas.[5]

3. The term “dispossession” refers not only to land but to the life of the whole community, through disempowerment, exile, migration and semi-slavery. At the session of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in San Isidro, Jalisco, the communities presented a discussion paper that complements the sentence issued by the people who served as jurors.

The document states: “What more brutal dispossession could there be than one that takes someone’s life and throws it away? The original and best-known form of grabbing was the dispossession of land. But on the other side of the coin, people have also been stripped of the fruits of their labour, squeezed out of their workforce and, today, this grabbing in thousands of human spheres is continuous and unstoppable.”

The bottom line is that corporations (bolstered by neoliberal policies and free trade agreements that empower these policies and render them immovable) are scrambling to “tear us away from our sources of subsistence – from our land, water, forests, seeds – that is, from our territory. We are being eroded and robbed of the livelihoods (our strategies and knowledge) with which communities defend our centre of reference, life, history, justice and our destiny as communities and peoples. The corporate and governmental onslaught has, at times, succeeded in impeding and criminalising the very core of the ancestral care that we communities treasure as the keys to our independence and autonomy.”[6]

The paper invites us to immerse ourselves in the procedural details of subjugation, rather than just be aware that it happens. Corporate action “destroys the conditions for people to manage their material and subjective environment; to maintain their livelihoods using their own individual and collective means, their own creativity.” This leads to what has already been mentioned: the fragmentation of communities, the erosion of connections, invasion, dispossession, land grabbing, the expulsion of people and extreme submission to enslaving work.

“Enslavement” is not used metaphorically. There are repeated scenarios with public repercussions. In June 2013, the company Bioparques de Occidente was denounced “by several day labourers who escaped from its agricultural fields in the municipality of San Gabriel and asked the authorities for support because of the conditions of semi-slavery in which they were living. For example, in one operation state authorities rescued 275 workers before issuing a fine of 1,740,000 pesos (Editor’s Note: around 85 000 US$).”

4. The agribusiness giant is a fraud. Since at least 2019, there have been efforts to reveal and establish the agribusiness strategy and grasp its triple rationale of dispossession: grabbing land and water – the lifeblood of communities –, disempowering peoples by eroding their material base and their ancestral strategies (peasant seeds and knowledge), and profiting from a weakened workforce driven from its land. “The agrifood giant” does not, in fact, produce food. It prioritises a few luxury export goods, such as “berries” (blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries), tequila, lemons, sugar and avocado, while people ingest ultra-processed, ultra-low quality, far more expensive foodstuffs, “with very high environmental and human health costs and lasting harmful effects.” Food is still produced by peasant farming communities, even if the cities do not realise it. Hunger will become widespread if peasant culture disappears, “hence the importance of the struggle for peasant life. The variety, quality and proximity of food depends on peasant farmers. It cannot depend on the flow of capital, the market and oil.”

Pig farms and factory farms, too, are driving out communities using intimidation and threats.

But even the fate that this Agroindustrial Monster brandishes over them has not been able to put an end to the resistance. Where people are still in control of their territory, or where they are recovering their land, it is clear to them that despite this constant pressure and the theft of resources (water, land and seeds), peasant and indigenous peoples are fending off the advance of the agro-industrial giant as best they can.

The cases of communities such as Cherán are emblematic of the resistance that people are putting up in order to defend their territory and their collective, full, diverse and creative life.[7]

The strange thing is that this dispossession enacted by agribusiness makes no sense. The agribusiness giant is not even profitable, even though it earns dividends and can boast of ranking among the top ten exporters of agricultural products.

Because while the state argues that agribusiness generates employment and food and serves the economy, in reality it generates corruption and dispossession, while normalising the idea that food sovereignty is a distant dream. As it cuts us off from our own resources, it seeks to convince us that growth is only possible through this model. This is false. And agave plantations are a stark demonstration of why. Two years ago, there was a worldwide boom in Mexican agave and tequila was selling like hotcakes. Today, two years later, the agave has completely depreciated in value and is now worthless. People are even being asked to pull them out. Sales of tequila, however, remain stable. How is this possible? Through the witchcraft of agribusiness, everything is stolen and hoarded. It also generates costs for whoever associates with it, as well as state subsidies. Proponents of so-called sustainable agave, or “Agave Responsable Ambiental (ARA)”, insist that the “tequila comes from agave plantations that have not caused deforestation since 2016”. Using a registry of plots of land on a virtual map and a report on their agricultural use pre-2016, they pretend to be curbing deforestation. In reality, there are various loopholes and other tricks in various regions that allow for new agro-industrial farmland to be opened up based on previous sowings by peasant farmers, leading people to believe that there has been no change in land use, due to the lack of institutional presence for regulation.

None of this would be sustainable without violence. The same is happening in Chile, Paraguay and Argentina as in Mexico: the intention is to destroy the ability of peoples and communities to autonomously guarantee their subsistence and ways of life, forcing them instead to join the globalised industrial market. Livelihoods are destroyed while this model grows: there will always be agrochemicals (fertilisers, pesticides), plastic for greenhouses, digital equipment for the much-vaunted “precision agriculture”. It all adds up to money laundering from subsidies and organised crime, the only elements that are truly profitable. The flow of money is vast and regardless of who is in so-called political power, the real power and control lies in agribusiness that has one foot in corruption and the other in criminal gangs. In “Avocados of Wrath”, an article on the avocado industry, the entire control strategy is laid bare at every step of the supply chain.

"Land grabbing by the avocado industry has laid the groundwork for invasion by greenhouse production. Greenhouses allow for total control over both labour, which has been profoundly casualized, and the land base. The common threads running through greenhouses are water and plastic. Israeli companies such as Netafim and Rivulis, which supply drip irrigation systems to the avocado industry, have found new customers among growers of berries and other products under greenhouses. It may not be a coincidence that Netafim was acquired by the powerful Mexican group Orbia, a regional leader in plastics. These technologies are presented as sustainable by virtue of the reduced water consumption that they make possible. But this is questionable if one considers the quantity of plastic required as well as the ecological and social footprint of the digitisation associated with this model."

In the workshop “Critical practice of agroecology; from a community vision and peasant knowledge in the face of agroindustry”, in San Isidro, Jalisco, Marina (not her real name) gave the following testimony about her own experience. Like so many others, she was quick to hire herself out to work for less than a hundred pesos a day in the greenhouses – with temperatures of 36-39 degrees in the shade –, where she was sprayed with highly toxic agrochemicals, with several of her children under the age of fifteen helping her with the scrubbing. One of them (amidst the daily confusion and the dizziness of the noises, fumes, the unpredictable movements of the stacking of boxes and the forklift) was seriously injured when one of the forklift's lifting blades caught on his ankle. They turned off the machines and attended to him. First aid arrived, but of course, the company almost immediately washed its hands of the injured child. They told her to take the child home so that he could rest for a day and that, as long as he turned up for work the day after that, he could keep his job. Of course, the boy returned. His leg quickly became infected, without any real medical attention, 36-39 degrees in the sun-shade, being sprayed with fairly toxic agrochemicals and humidity coming from everywhere – all for less than a hundred pesos a day. “With such mistreatment his condition did not remain stable. The boy very soon died from a gangrenous leg. The company gave them just 500 pesos (about $30) and told them to say no more about it. For the first few weeks she mourned her son’s murder in silence and continued to work. But one day Marina decided to leave. She left the greenhouses to wash and iron kilos and kilos of other people’s clothes, knowing that she had escaped hell itself.” [8]

5. Such is the violence enacted by major transnationals. Despite this, communities insist on remaining rooted to their land, to their people, to their seeds: an unending struggle. They are sustained by the conviction that, above all, they must continue to use their own creative and collective means to secure what matters most to them: in this case, food sovereignty and the defence of their lives in their territories.

[1] Sylvia Marcos, personal memo

[3] Ruling of the National Preliminary Hearing: Transgenic Contamination of Native Maize, San Luis Beltrán, Oaxaca, 26-27 April 2013

[5] See Ruling on Territoriality, subsistence and dignified life, op.cit.

[6] Colectivo por la Autonomía, ETC Group and GRAIN, "Territoriality, subsistence and dignified life. General context document of the complaints before the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in San Isidro, Jalisco, 27 June 2013. https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTMvMDgvMDYvMTJfMjJfMDhfMzAzXzA3dGVycml0b3JpYWxpZGFkNzcucGRmIl1d [in Spanish]

[7] See Daniela Rico Straffon and Edgars Martínez Navarrete, Las raíces del despojo, Conaculta, 2022 [in Spanish].

[8] See Ramón Vera-Herrera, Dentro y fuera de la piel del mundo, Editorial Itaca, Mexico, 2019, pp 101-102 [in Spanish]