TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook Minute for Mission: International Day of Farmers’ Struggles
Luc Celestin waits for the early rains before planting his cornfields in the high mountains of Haiti. He knows the rains come when they will, and not nearly as predictably as a decade ago. The changing climate is most jarring for those in island nations.
The fields have been leveled, the soil turned. And when the time is right, he carries a handful of corn and bean seeds in one hand, uses the other hand to drill a shallow hole in the loose soil and drops in the seeds.
One corn seed and four beans. In a matter of weeks, the strands of bean will tangle around the corn stalk. Together they will grow.
Celestin has been a farmer all his life. In Haitian Creole, a peyizan translates to peasant or farmer. He owns a number of cornfields. Members of his community who have little access to food are welcome to harvest from these fields.
Chances are you believe the word “peasant” is a derogatory one. It might recall the poor folk of earlier times, people who had nothing and survived renting a bit of land to farm.
Centuries later, peasants continue to work the land in several developing countries, often decried as the lowest of the low, but rather are the backbone of struggling societies.
In the Presbyterian Hunger Program, we are honored to accompany those who are known as peasants. In fact, we tip our hat to the peasant movements around the world. These movements are as old as modern life.
Today we honor these people who work hard against increasingly difficult obstacles to provide us with food. After a brutal attack on farmers fighting for agrarian reform in 1996, Via Campesina began the International Day of Farmers’ Struggles.
Nearly 30 years later, the struggles are ever more difficult.
War, intense political strife, drought, punishing natural disasters and oppressive governments continue to lash out at the ones who feed their communities. Famine and hunger are on the rise. Farmers are rising in protest in Europe as well as the Caribbean and Central and South America. But the uprisings don’t all look like protests or demonstrations.
Very often, farmers and peasants rise by working harder to grow healthy food and create strategies to combat toxic pesticides.
In El Salvador members of the Joining Hands network ARUMES not only fight for better working conditions of those in the sugarcane industry, but they also work hard to raise organic products. More than 80% of the food consumed in the country is imported. Such produce often is raised in or sprayed with harmful pesticides.
Sonia Gutierrez is a member of ARUMES and an activist for healthy foods, a movement she discovered in 2015. Since then, she’s studies ancestral food production in El Salvador. She’s worked with Indigenous communities and worked in several community gardens.
“Before, I wasn’t so interested in my health, but when I learned about agroecology, I understood that easting isn’t the same as nourishing oneself,” she said.
Another force in promoting indigenous and organic food is fellow ARUMES member Ana Edith Morales. For more than a decade, she has harvested Ojushte, a nut grown for centuries in Central America, but one that had fallen out of favor by contemporary consumers.
Ana Edith led a movement to reclaim the Ojushte into El Salvador society, It is a nutritious staple whose flour is baked into healthy, tasty goods as well as think warm drinks. Dozens of young people find work in harvesting, drying and processing the nuts. And even more attend events to spread the word of the benefits of tis ancestral product.
Like Luc Celestin in Haiti, Ana Edith and Sonia ensure that soil is kept healthy and nutritious goods can be harvested. And none of them keep the food for themselves.
Farmers around the world perhaps are facing greater struggles than ever. But it is in the spirit of the peasant to work harder so that more people have access to nourishment.
"What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential, hidden support"--from "Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership: by Andro Linklater.
Cindy Corell; Joining Hands Land, Food and Agribusiness Concerns; FONDAMA (in Haiti); Global Solidarity Collective (Joining Hands); former Mission Co-Worker, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Let us join in prayer for:
Tracey King-Ortega, Mission Coordinator II, Mission Partners & Program, Interim Unified Agency
Oweeda Kinnaird, Trust Associate, Presbyterian Foundation
Let us pray:
God of justice, protect and encourage those who work the land and provide your children their daily bread. Please be with those who dedicate their lives to growing produce, raising livestock and processing local nutrients. Let them know of their work, that though their efforts go without praise they are deeply valued. In Jesus' name. Amen.