“The right to food is nature too”: food justice and everyday environmental expertise in the Salvadoran permaculture movement

ABSTRACT

In El Salvador a growing permaculture movement attunes small-scale farming activities to principles of ecological observation. The premise is twofold: close-grained appreciation of already-interacting biophysical processes allows for the design of complementary social and agricultural systems requiring minimum energy inputs. Secondly, the insistence on campesino smallholders as actors in the design of sustainable food systems directly addresses decades of “top-down” developmental interventions, from Green Revolution experiments in the 1960s and 1970s to international food security programmes in the 1990s. Permaculture connects food insecurity to the delegitimisation of smallholder innovation and insists that, through sharing simple techniques, campesino farmers can contribute towards future-oriented questions of environmental sustainability. This repositioning is brought about through the mobilisation of pedagogical techniques that legitimise the experiences and expertise of small-scale farmers, while standardising experimental methods for testing, evaluating and sharing agroecological practices. Like food sovereignty and food justice movements, Salvadoran permaculture links hunger with longer histories of (uneven) capital accumulation and dispossession and renders campesino farmers its protagonists. By modelling a form of expertise premised in intimate involvement with specific environments, permaculture goes still further, seeking to dislodge a pervasive knowledge politics that situates some as knowers and innovators, and others as passive recipients. This grounds human rights in an ethos of caring for the “more-than-human” world and places emphasis on a corollary right as part of food justice, increasingly being demanded “from below”: the right to know.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-colonial
• food justice
• food sovereignty
• El Salvador
• agroecology
• permaculture

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Acknowledgements

The author owes considerable gratitude to Karen Inwood and Reina Meijia, influential women in the permaculture movement, without whom it would not have been possible to carry out this research. Thanks to the permaculture movement for hosting the author with great hospitality during each research visit, and to all informants and interviewees. This paper was originally produced as part of the Food Justice: Knowing Food/Securing the Future conference that took place on 16–17 July 2014, and the author would like to thank the organisers, Agatha Herman and Mike Goodman, for all their work to put together this excellent event, as well as their comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers who provided rich and informative direction to the final form of my argument. The author nevertheless takes all responsibility for the opinion and any error presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Naomi Millner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2114-6298

Notes

1 Translations are the author's own, from audio transcriptions.

2 In Nicaragua the main clearing ground was the UNAG (Nicaraguan Unión Nacional de Agriculturores y Ganaderos) founded in 1983 by smallholders, cooperatives and medium-sized landowners who felt underrepresented in Sandinista-dominated rural workers' unions (Edelman 1998, p. 58). The UNAG received visitors from abroad and assumed a central role in the CaC program.