The Long Road: Rural Youth, Farming and Agroecological Formación in Central America

ABSTRACT

Across the globe, the countryside faces the “generation problem”: Who will grow food when the current generation of aging small farmers and peasants disappears? A combination of objective and subjective factors effectively discourages young people from assuming the continuity of peasant and family farming, especially in countries that have experienced significant neoliberal dismantling of rural infrastructure and education. Rural social movements are increasingly building educational processes linked with small-scale, ecological farming in the hopes of reinforcing the development of identities and skills for peasant futures and cadre in the struggle for popular land reform, agroecology, and food sovereignty.

Notes

1. An anonymous reviewer noted that ‘in the current political climate, it’s dangerous to suggest that science is somehow wrong.’ Agroecological social movements criticize Western reductionist science as it now exists, that is to say, in the context of publically funded research becoming private property through copyrights and patents, and in as much as reductionism prevents holistic, long-term solutions. By no means do social movements loan themselves to the arguments used by neo-Right political currents that advocate, for example, ignoring environmental science.

2. The module on Latin American history also included debate about the causes and consequences of the ongoing return of hardline neoliberal governments in South American countries like Argentina and Brazil, although this was not part of the material prepared for the class.

3. The piñata refers to a notorious episode in Nicaraguan history when, after losing the elections of 1990, many Sandinista officials with administrative power over state and collective assets, mostly farms and houses, quickly privatized those assets in the name of close allies rather than handing them over to the newly elected neoliberal government. Much of what was properly handed over was also subsequently privatized during the ensuing neoliberal administrations (see Núñez-Soto, 1995).