Reviving Andean Culture: The Founding of Chuyma Aru
Nestor Chambi Pacoricona, one of the founding members of Chuyma Aru Association – an Oxfam parter based in Puno, Peru – tells their story in this interview excerpt.
In our experience with state and private development organizations, we began to notice that the day after an organization would pull out of a rural community, everything that had been done in that community would fall apart-even in communities with big irrigation and livestock projects where many millions of dollars had been invested. The new in-frastructure was not being used. The campesino (peasant) communities would go back to their own ways of living and working -- the ways of their ancestors.
So we asked ourselves, Why? We thought there was something there, and we started looking at traditional knowledge. We thought that if we worked in our own communities to carry our principles forward, we would be closer to the people and have greater understanding. That is how we formed Chuyma Aru.
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One of the first tasks that we undertook was to collect information and statistics from state organizations. From the state's agriculture and animal husbandry census, we learned that campesinos in Peru had only 10 percent of the arable land; the rest was in the hands of large agricultural companies or medium-sized producers. But the interesting fact was that the campesinos produced 60 percent of the food consumed in the country. We thought that was a very important indicator, and confirmed that campesino communities had a lot of potential. We started to think and dream that if that land area could be augmented by just 20 percent, perhaps the campesinos could produce all of the nation's food and even have some left over for selling abroad.
We were also aware of a large-scale evaluation of land in the Andes that declared Peru a non-agricultural country. We thought that if the experts are saying that this land isn't good for anything, can't produce anything, and yet the campesinos were creating their small family plots on the uppermost tip of dry mountains and are producing this much food, that there must be potential there.
So we set out to discover what it was that allowed their potential to be so great, and we came upon the concept of the indigenous Aymara campesino cosmovision -- their way of seeing the world. We saw that everything in the Andean world is based on the concept of crianza -- raising or caretaking. Andeans, especially Aymaras, feel equal with nature -- that they are an entity within nature, not separate or above or more powerful than, but part of and within nature. So from this we began to see that in the Aymara communities, potatoes and other agricultural crops as well as animals, hillsides, mountains and the earth were treated as another person and not as something separate and apart.
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When the Green Revolution started, a study showed that insects were eating about 10 percent of the agricultural products in the high-altitude plains. In response, they started a big program to eradicate the insect population. However, 40 years later, we were surprised to see a new study that said insects are eating even more of the produce now.
We see that, on the other side, the Indians are not trying to eradicate the insects; they are in a sense trying to enter into a conversation with them. Natural indicators, or signs, are a result of this kind of conversation. Aymara campesinos know from these signs what the next season, the next year, will be like -- whether there will be heavy rains, drought or an intermediate year.
Although we're from that world, we've passed through all those perspectives that came to us from school and from formal education, and in a certain way we've taken ourselves out of our culture....I was trained in the university as an agronomist, and when I returned to the communities, people thought I knew a lot about growing food. But I had never taken a chacra (family plot) from a state of regrowth and needing to rejuvenate it all the way to harvest. There were many things I needed to learn from the communities. To live the concept of crianza, rather than just to study it, is another thing. To know the secrets that exist in the communities and to act on them is a form of commitment.
For example, to cultivate a chacra you need to know the signs that can be read through this conversation with your surroundings. And I didn't know the signs. I had gone to university, but I didn't have the wisdom that existed within Aymara campesino communities. I had never talked with my father about the wisdom that he had, and neither did he have the confidence to tell me these things. He had sent me to the university thinking that I would return knowing much more than he. So when I returned to the community, I had to work to find a way to converse with my dad about these things. Finally in the end he was delighted, and we sat up every night for days on end talking. He would recount to me all this knowledge that he had. It turns out that he knew more than 100 signs that were useful in working a chacra.
There's an entire body of knowledge that needs to be respected and learned in order to grow a chacra. For example, Aymaras can tell if the next year will be a year of rain or drought. They look for signs in plants, animals and insects. If it's a year of rain, for example, it will be good for raising tubers or roots, and that's what they will plant. If it's dry, it will be good for raising greens. They look for and read signs to see if it will be more productive to plant early, late or at the normal time.
The Green Revolution had a great effect here by bringing hybrid seeds. They arrived at the best moment they could have in the Andes. The rains the year before produced conditions that allowed the hybrid forms to produce very large potatoes -- up to three kilos each. The technicians said to the local people, "See? Your potato isn't worth anything; these are better. Plant these." And people started to say, "Yeah, they're right. Look, these are better; ours are so small." And the communities started to lose their native seeds.
But this lasted only a short time. When the heavy frosts came, the hybrids were not able to withstand the cold. They weren't as hardy as the native species. But the native species had already begun to be lost. We used to have more than 200 varieties of potatoes. This was a very critical moment for Aymara campesinos.
The campesinos also practiced intercropping, putting up to five types of potatoes in the same plot. So if some types are resistant to frosts and others to drought, to floods, to fungus attacks, there's a variety of potatoes that serve to protect the farmers no matter what the conditions. This way, Aymara campesinos never had a complete failure. But after being reduced to the one or two varieties that were introduced by the Green Revolution, they ran the risk of a complete failure.
We've chosen to affirm Andean culture. We come back to our central principle that work needs to be centered in crianza. What we have to do is use our own knowledge to deal with our own problems.