| For over thirty years Movimiento Campesino a Campesino, the Farmer to Farmer Movement, has spread sustainable agricultural alternatives among smallholders throughout Mexico and Central America. Supported by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and farmers' organizations (FOs), Campesino a Campesino has improved agricultural performance and reduced environmental degradation on over 15,000 subsistence farms in the region.; Technically and methodologically, NGOs and International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) have borrowed heavily from and contributed to Campesino a Campesino's efforts. Nonetheless, "scaling up" sustainable agriculture has proven difficult, and leadership of sustainable agriculture in Mesoamerica is contested among these actors.; In 1999 I led "Measuring Farmers Agroecological Resistance to Hurricane Mitch," a region-wide, participatory action-research study designed and carried out with over 2,000 farmers and technicians following Central America's "storm of the century." Findings from the study confirmed Campesino a Campesino's claim to sustainable agriculture: their farms had significantly fewer crop, soil and economic losses to Hurricane Mitch than their conventional neighbors, suggesting the Movement's practices were more sustainable. Study participants argued for national programs of agricultural reconstruction based on Campesino a Campesino's agroecological methods and participatory principles. But despite significant international support for reconstruction, and despite a strong national NGO coalition for reconstruction, the Campesino a Campesino proposal (and all NGO initiatives for participatory, sustainable reconstruction) went unnoticed.; An assessment of the study's impact in Nicaragua found that while NGOs and FOs have been instrumental in developing technical alternatives to conventional agriculture and have provided crucial support to Campesino a Campesino , sustainable, participatory strategies in agriculture suffer from a "policy ceiling." Scaling up sustainable agricultural development may not be possible without broad-based efforts to create political will for new national and international policy contexts that specifically favor sustainability. I speculate that scaling up sustainable agricultural development will come about through social change rather than simply technological innovation and market efficiency as promoted by IARCs and most NGOs. I suggest that Campesino a Campesino should be central to this task, and conclude by suggesting leadership development strategies for a transition from a 'farmer-led' to a 'movement-led' approach to sustainable agricultural development in Mesoamerica. |
