Organic agroecology, feminism, and spirituality

After that oh-so-unpresumptous title, this post demands a bit more seriousness than some previous posts. I have started to get beyond the pangs of homesickness and constant culture shock to participate in my placement and surroundings a bit more, and two weekends ago I had one of the most profound participatory experiences of my life.


I spent Friday through Sunday discussing food sovereignity, the right to eat, and the dangers of soy monoculture (devoting most of the Argentine farmland to soy production for export) in this country and others in South America. The women with whom I work at the mission in Resistencia and I attended a women´s retreat at an organic women´s coop farm near Santa Fe, the capital city of the province below El Chaco. The well-organized event was very educational and allowed me and other participants to develop our understandings of the problems related to food access in Argentina and especially how those problems relate to women´s lives.


The conference´s focus on "food sovereignity" was concerned with the basic human right to access ample, high-quality, culturally appropriate food. An important part of food sovereinity is the necessity of communities (i.e. nation-states) to produce all or most of their own food needs, so as not to be dependent on other nations for basic alimentation. This is especially relevant in Argentina, which, like the U.S., has vast tracts of agriculturally productive land. Based purely on natural resources, there is no reason that any Argentine should go hungry.
However, those vast tracts of land are currently producing soy for export instead of wheat, corn, beef, citrus, and other crops suitable for human consumption. Argentina is currently the second largest producer of soy in the world (after only the U.S.) , as soy genetically modified for Round-Up pesticide has proved extremely profitable for a very few people. Now, I do not know much about soy farming in the U.S., other than that I live around and am related to many soy farmers. I believe that the environmental controls on pesticide are fairly strict, and that we also have a greater need for soy than Argentina does. But the results of a rapid transition to soy farming here have had disastrous effects on the agricultural economy. Thousands of farm laborers have lost their jobs, forcing them to move to the cities, where there are no more jobs. In the meantime, basic foodstuff must be imported at high prices. Mass unemployment combined with increasing food costs have produced a lot of really, really unneccesary hunger. Poor environmental controls on RoundUp may have caused birth defects and considerable sickness in children who encounter the substance.

Many of the people who own the land on which soy is grown are not Argentine, and view the land as a short-term investment rather than a long-term sustainable project. Consequently, many farms are in constant soy production, with no crop rotation or thought of maintaining arable soil. The quest for soy land (which turns a short-term profit) has also contributed to the mass deforestation of El Chaco (where we are living this year). The destruction of this ecosystem has led directly to the increase in summer temperatures from around 100 degrees Farenheit, to insufferable heat that often approaches 120 degrees F.

Although there are many comedores (soup kitchens) that have been offered soy-based dishes, it turns out that soy actually impedes young children´s ability to absorb nutrients. So feeding them soy amplifies the problems of anemia and malnutrition. Many are asking why wheat and beef, the staples of Argentine diet, must become more and more inaccesible to all involved. In a food-rights sense, the concern about importing and exporting most of one´s food has more to do with direct connections to food production than the more common environmental concept of "food-miles," which may or may not help the environment, and also may or may not help people eat.

One thing that surprised me was the close connection of soy production to the trafficking of women. Some argue that the infrastructure which soy production demands also provides avenues for trafficking: highways and railways, increasingly used to transport soy and decreasingly used for public transit, make clandestine transport easy, and any subsequent attempts at getting back home more difficult. In addition to this, the movement of employment from agricutural communities to trucking and transit creates a mobile population of mostly men alone, far from home, helping create the market for prostitution. This theme has been a major interest of the women´s group at our church here in Resistencia (see previous entries in this blog for more information). One of the women at the retreat shared that she had intercepted her neighbor´s 12-year-old daughter on her way to a fishy job offer that would almost certainly have landed her in forced prostitution; knowing that we are all only 2 or 3 degrees away from women being bought and sold is tragic and makes me understand better why this topic is attracting so much attention in the church and nation here.

Anyway, for more information, some in English, you can look at the website http://www.lasojamata.org. This is a horribly complicated and horrifying problem, especially since assuredly no one intended to cause so much harm to land and people through profitable farming for export. Of course, overproduction of soy does not help anyone except those who buy soy cheaply for use in biofuel and cattle feed.

The event made the local paper, if you can read a bit of Spanish: http://www.unosantafe.com.ar/26.10.2008/noticias/8612_M+s_de_150_mujeres_discutieron_el_modelo_agropecuario_vigente.html

The retreat, incidentally, allowed me to experience a robust, pro-child, pro-family feminist spirit that I have not felt in a long time. Many women brought their babies, and of course mate was consumed on all sides. (see previous post) I bought my own mate, made of recycled materials at a women´s coop in Córdoba. I also accompanied one of the women who was with me in painting a Lutheran rose in a mural commemorating the event, which made me reflect on the Christian spirituality that is often absent in such discussions.

So why should this be a topic of concern for missionaries and for Christians? Why do I think that a symbol of Lutheran faith relates to food rights? I have been reflecting on this a lot, and am tossing around some ideas in my head.

We are commanded to feed the hungry, and I see food rights as securely grounded in Christ´s teachings. That all should have access to food seems enshrined in Leviticus, in the Gospels, in the example of the early Church. I also recall that Jesus used culturally appropriate food to communicate--figs, fish, wine, bread. The central sacrament of our faith asks us to remember Christ through metaphors of food. Our need for His love and redemption is, like our need for food, constant, and our expressions of that need are culturally mediated. Perhaps in solidarity for food rights, we can all try to use locally produced bread and wine/grape juice for our communion celebrations. Please pray for the many South Americans fighting for access to affordable food and for those accompanying the men, women, and children suffering from unneccesary hunger today.