Organize or die: Farm school pedagogy and the political ecology of the agroecological transition in rural Haiti

ABSTRACT

This article examines the political and pedagogical role of the farm school in Haiti's largest and oldest peasants' movement, the Peasants' Movement of Papaye (MPP). It draws upon ongoing ethnographic research with MPP as well as documentary and historical analyses of agrarian politics in Haiti to situate the movement's land-based decolonial political praxis in a political ecology of education framework, centering concepts of participation, conscientization, and autonomy. I use three key pedagogical principles in MPP's agroecological education program to illustrate the micropolitical processes by which smallholders negotiate processes of agrarian transformation: decentralization, social process methodology, and the good acroecologist model.

KEYWORDS:

• agroecology
• decolonial
• political ecology

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by funding from the Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellowship and the University of California Global Food Initiative. The author acknowledges, first and foremost, the generosity with which MPP members shared their work during the field research period. The author is likewise immensely grateful for the guidance and support of special issue editors Dr. David Meek and Dr. Theresa Lloro-Bidart, as well as the useful comments from Associate Editor Dr. Phil Payne. Finally, the author thanks the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback, as well as colleagues and friends at the University of California, Davis, who offered insightful guidance in sharpening this article.

Notes

1. La Via Campesina, or the “peasant way” is an international social movement representing more than 200 million farmers worldwide, founded in 1993 by member organizations including MPP. LVC is comprised of many rural organizations across the globe, which support more than 40 peasant agroecology schools, including MPP's in Haiti. MPP's agroecology training center is here referred to as a “farm school” (Desmarais, 2007; Phillips & Roberts, 2011).

2. See McCune, Reardon, & Rosset (2014), for a discussion of the development of agroecological formaciòn as a pedagogical tool of popular struggle within LVC's Latin American member organizations.

3. MPP's mystik closely parallels MSTs use of the mística as a “praxis of empowerment” in Brazil. See Issa (2007) and McNee (2002) for discussion of MST's use of the mística.

4. It was not until 1982, for example, that Haitian Creole —spoken exclusively by the majority of Haiti's population — became the official languages of instruction in basic education (Howe, 1993: 291, 293). See Pamphile (1985) for an in-depth discussion of the administration of Haiti's vocational agriculture program by occupying US forces.

5. State and bilaterally run development agendas, in contrast, have tended to recapitulate colonial centers of metropolitan power by promoting the French language and French instructional paradigms. Haiti's autocratic leaders similarly reinforced class divisions by turning to pan-Africanist, noiriste rhetoric to support a nationalist agenda in the mid- to late-20th century, during which rural lives were systematically separated from the elite urban sphere (see Trouillot, 1990).