Movimiento Campesino a Campesino

Movimiento Campesino a Campesino (MCAC) is the name of the Peasant to Peasant Movement in Mesoamerica (Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua). It began in 1972 in Guatemala and spread to Mexico in the late 1970s. In 1987, it was first introduced to Nicaragua. The movement involves peasant farmers training one another on agroecological farming techniques.

"Methodologically, MCAC drew from simple, people-centered development principles, and from the revolutionary, pedagogical practices of popular education to fashion nonhierarchical learning techniques that stressed experimentation and mutual aid for the farmer-led development of sustainable agriculture."

"For the campesinos in MCAC, the ability to access, adapt, create, use, and defend agroecological knowledge on their own terms is an exercise in autonomy."

Use of Promotores Instead of Extension Agents

"Socially, the Mexican farmers viewed themselves as distinct from the government's agricultural extensionists. Extensionists were viewed with suspicion by the ejidatarios because they spoke an unintelligible technical language, generally gave bad or irrelevant advice, and were often more interested in helping the rural bank recover its production credit than they were in helping farmers solve agricultural problems. Above all, they were outsiders and, for the most part, had little or no farming experience. In the tradition of community health and literary advocates, the farmers working with [MCAC] called themselves promotores to identify with their neighbors and distance themselves from the extensionists."

Contrast to Expert-Led Development

"By employing technicians to support local farmers in the development of their own agriculture rather than through simple technology transfer, they inverted the conventional top-down, expert-driven intervention approach to agricultural extension and initiated a new-farmer-technician relationship that produced agroecosystem-specific knowledge for agricultural development in situ."

"What is not always appreciated is that this technology "transfer" is really the reflection of a deeper, culturally embedded exchange in which knowledge is generated and shared."

"This approach ran counter to the Green Revolution's Transfer of Technology (TOT) strategies based on "diffusion theory" (Rogers 1962, 1969), which emphasized centralized, expert-driven development of technology and diffusion through professional extension to "early adopters." It also ran counter to the conventional, integrated rural development programs advanced by the official development agencies that attempted to address all of the village's problems at once.

"These strategies required high levels of expert intervention and management of the development process... The low level of success of these strategies was blamed on bad extension and farmer "apathy."... In contrast, in an attempt at farmer-led (rather than expert-led) development, the people-centered, agricultural approach [MCAC] put basic tools for innovation and extension directly in the hands of farmers."

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

• La Via Campesina
• Organic Agriculture in Cuba During the Special Period

External Resources

• Peter Michael Rosset, Braulio Machín Sosa, Adilén María Roque Jaime & Dana Rocío Ávila Lozano, "The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty," Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2011, p. 161-191.

Books

• Eric Holt-Gimenez, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture, Food First Books, Oakland, CA, 2006.
• Fernando Funes, Luis Garcia, Martin Bourque, Nilda Perez, Peter Rosset, eds, “Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba,” Food First Books, 2002.