Religion and Sustainable Agriculture

World Spiritual Traditions and Food Ethics

Todd LeVasseur,Pramod Parajuli,Norman Wirzba

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813167992
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Religione

Distinct practices of eating are at the heart of many of the world's faith traditions—from the Christian Eucharist to Muslim customs of fasting during Ramadan to the vegetarianism and asceticism practiced by some followers of Hinduism and Buddhism. What we eat, how we eat, and whom we eat with can express our core values and religious devotion more clearly than verbal piety.

In this wide-ranging collection, eminent scholars, theologians, activists, and lay farmers illuminate how religious beliefs influence and are influenced by the values and practices of sustainable agriculture. Together, they analyze a multitude of agricultural practices for their contributions to healthy, ethical living and environmental justice. Throughout, the contributors address current critical issues, including global trade agreements, indigenous rights to land and seed, and the effects of postcolonialism on farming and industry. Covering indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives, this groundbreaking volume makes a significant contribution to the study of ethics and agriculture.

1

Our Flesh Was Made from Corn

Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz and Cristóbal Cojtí García

Ixmukane, our grandmother of creation, ground the white and yellow corn kernels, and formed from the dough the four bodies of our grandfathers: Balam Kitzen, Balam Aq’ab’, Majukutaj, and Iq B’alam and then she made nine drinks that became the blood of our first grandparents and parents.

—Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya People

The Mayan civilization unites spirituality, science, and agriculture, thus creating an agriculture that is in harmony with nature, the individual, and society, weaving all the elements together as part of the cosmic fabric. Harmony is created by respecting principles that consider the human being as one integral element of the whole system rather than the main or dominant element of that system. In this context, the person respects the life of all other elements, understanding that all elements are alive and have their own mission. Another principle is “You are my other self”—this principle considers that one’s life influences another’s life and vice versa; thus, one must love the other as much as one loves oneself. And that “you” is not only other people; “you” is nature, water, soil, plants, animals—everything, because every thing is alive. That is why nature and agriculture go together: they look to reinforce each other.

This way of life and agriculture honors existing resources, biodiversity, and the preservation of future generations, and is integrally oriented by both the Mayan sacred calendar, Chol q’ij, and the 260-day lunar calendar, marked by nine lunar phases (the gestation time for human life), together with the solar calendar Ab’, the 365-day agricultural calendar. The understanding of time is incredibly important because apart from governing agricultural work, each day offers advice for life, because each day has its own energy and numerical figure; each day has its own charm and secrets, its own name, its Nagual, a living being that encourages us; each day is inspired by its cardinal direction, containing the force of one of the essential elements: fire, air, water, or earth. This means that each day has its own life force, one that repeats with the same vitality in a cycle of fifty-two years, when Chol q’ij and Ab’ coincide once more. This wealth of ideas, spiritual facts, and materials allows people and their community to be in unity with agriculture and to adjust their actions accordingly.

Guatemala’s population is currently 14,713,763, and 60 percent of the inhabitants are indigenous: Mayan, Xinca, or Garifuna, who between them speak twenty-three languages.¹ These groups preserve their ethnic tradition, rituals, and social organization in various and different ways. Guatemala’s ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity and the rights of indigenous people to live by their own cultural norms were legally recognized in 1995 with the signing of the indigenous rights accords. Since then, indigenous peoples in Guatemala have been reinforcing their cultural and ethnic organization, including in the realm of agriculture.

Historical Mayan agriculture required keeping track of time, which began to have a spiritual, social, and scientific function in which everything belonged to a whole, and agriculture itself wasn’t differentiated from the human being, from society, or from the cosmos. In this integration, the union of the cosmos, nature, people, and all living things is valued and respected, as both the interdependency and the complementarity of everything is recognized. For in the end, people, like all beings, are part of the cosmic fabric. The planet is known as Mother Earth, who offers everything that makes life possible: she produces the trees and all of the plants, she provides water and calls down the rain, she houses and feeds the animals who then create music and dance—all of which allows us to feed our communities. Thus, people belong to Mother Earth, not the other way around, for she is not our property; she cannot be sold or bought.²

The products of agriculture are granted to us with love from Mother Earth, Father Sky, Sister Water, and Brother Sun to nurture the social ideal of living well, meaning that the whole community has enough to share in harmony. The “good life” doesn’t allow for some people to have more than they need while others suffer without, because it encompasses the fundamental value that “you are my other self.” The Sky’s Heart and the Earth’s Heart make up all people, giving them their heart, mind, and body as well as a full capacity to live with dignity while loving and respecting all that allows them to exist.³

The Maya are an agroecological civilization. Over the course of thousands of years, they developed a deep, profound knowledge and agrarian practice that afforded well-being and allowed them to achieve complete economic, political, social, and cultural development. Mayan life and agriculture are driven by a holistic vision of physical and spiritual interdependence, and by a worldview rooted in spirituality. These characteristics are vital and persist as an inspiration and guide to creating integrated development that is complementary to and in harmony and equilibrium with nature, family, and community.⁴ The Mayan culture believes all beings have their light and dark side, hot and cold, masculine and feminine; moreover, the Maya view these supposed opposites as not contradictory or competing with one another, but rather as complementary, diverse, and necessary for existence in a cycle of constant development. Diversity, then, is recognized as an essential ingredient of life; to be different is not to be opposite but complementary. This principle also applies to agriculture and has enhanced agricultural diversity.⁵

The Spanish invasion in 1524 and the subsequent conquest destroyed the economic, political, and social structures of the Maya, and deeply attacked their spirituality. During the colonial period and even up to today, the Mayan people have been evicted from their lands, discriminated against, segregated, exploited, and murdered. Their spirituality and its manifestations are condemned and attacked.⁶ Spanish conquerors imposed the Catholic religion on the indigenous populations as an ideological instrument of domination. True to the ideology of the Maya, attacks against their agrarian economy and attacks against their spirituality are one and the same. Dispossession, discrimination, and exploitation have historically been the principal aggressors against Mayan spirituality, because without land or dignity there cannot be the kind of communion that feeds spirituality.⁷

Originally, the Maya occupied extremely productive lands and developed a technology that is known today as agroecology, based on the application of concepts and principles of ecological design, development, and sustainable agrarian system management.⁸ Pre-Columbian people lived in valleys with abundant water resources and a six-month rainy season; in this environment agriculture imitated the natural life of plants and animals in a harmonious interdependence. Intercropping was used during planting: seeding corn, beans, and different types of squash all in the same space. Corn was the main source of sustenance, beans both complemented the diet and fertilized the soil, and squash added to the diet, retained soil moisture, and suppressed weeds. Thus, the population had a rich and balanced diet, while sustainable agricultural practices preserved the fertility of the soil. There was abundant production that allowed people to live well and maintain surpluses without exploiting the land. The main driver of agricultural production was community life, not the generation of commodities. Producing in order to sustain life was and remains linked to spirituality, and so one must ask permission and forgiveness to use the earth; bless the seeds, water, sun, air, and labor; and finally, give thanks and share the fruits of Mother Earth.⁹

During colonization, the Maya were suppressed and condemned to live in the mountains on rugged, fragile soil, so that they were forced to cut down trees and jungle to create the agricultural land necessary to stay alive. In contrast, the colonists appropriated the highly productive lowlands, and in 1525 this act of expropriation was legitimized by the pope, creating the Latifundio-minifundio system, now the backbone of Guatemala’s agricultural production system.¹⁰ Practices of expropriation, marginalization, exploitation, discrimination, and murder of the indigenous population have continued into the twenty-first century. As late as 2011, fourteen communities in the Polochic Valley (Baja Veraz, Guatemala) experienced cases of eviction, destruction of homes and crops, violence toward peasants, and assassinations.¹¹

Through colonization, the Europeans classified the indigenous populations as an inferior race, treating them as subhuman. The concept of race is a political system defined through inheritance and social categorization, symbolically constructed from skin color. Race categorization was invented by the Europeans to justify attacking and usurping the land and labor of indigenous peoples and African slaves. In this way, the colonizers acquitted themselves of being characterized as criminal, illegal, and terrorist for their violent acts of conquest. “Race” criminalizes nonwhites and decriminalizes whites, and so history has been built on a basis of racism.¹² Such structural racism created by the imposed system has destroyed much of sustainable agriculture and the spirituality of indigenous people all throughout the Americas.

In 1871, liberal reform in Guatemala established a new system of exploitation of land and the labor force, as dominant Creoles protected by the law expropriated communal lands and imposed forced labor on the indigenous community for export production. The objectives of the reform were to subjugate the indigenous and poor mestizo populations, forcing them to sell their labor cheaply and survive from what they produced in their minifundios, or smallholdings. Historically, this phenomenon reinforced the impoverishment of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples.¹³ With the revolution of 1944 there were significant changes, but coerced labor, though forbidden, continues and persists to this day under disguised forms.¹⁴

Under these conditions of exploitation and domination, the Maya engaged in religious syncretism, combining the imposed Catholicism and their own spirituality, a practice that still exists today. Some writers explain this by attributing it to the “devil,” but this characterization fails to take into account the indigenous consciousness and spirit of rebellion. Hidden within the mystical shadows of Catholicism, the Maya maintain their own expression and spirituality, a reflection of their own firm, powerful mentality.¹⁵

After World War II, in order to make use of the surplus nitrates (for explosives) and poisons (for gas), the United States turned these chemicals into fertilizers and pesticides. To create international markets for these products, it was necessary to replace traditional farming with the industrial model of production. In an effort to spread industrial farming and at the same time provide a technological alternative to the agrarian reform being demanded by Guatemala’s peasant movements, the United States, through its Agency for International Development (USAID) and international institutions such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and the CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research), promoted the Green Revolution. This consisted of increasing the production of basic grains with high-yielding varieties and improved hybrid seeds. With these came the demand for and use of external chemical inputs produced with petroleum that combined fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, and mechanized agriculture. Proponents of the Green Revolution, such as William Gaud, publicly prided themselves on their achievements, noting that the external assistance they financed increased agricultural production.¹⁶ What they did not mention was that this “assistance” was made possible by loans, and that the new system required agricultural expansion, destroying forest and jungle for the sake of production.

Map of Guatemala. (Based on Problèmes d’Amérique latine 43 [1976].)

In Latin America, the Green Revolution was promoted between 1960 and 1980 and even persisted into the 1990s.¹⁷ Initially, Latin American states had to invest more in agriculture during the Green Revolution, providing subsidies, price incentives, infrastructure, and research. These programs were established as conditions for loans for agricultural development. In Guatemala, such loans were quickly plagued by corruption, racism, and structural inequalities. The Green Revolution changed the mode of production and the agricultural markets, decreasing the access of the poor population—mostly indigenous Mayans—to land and staple foods. On top of the harmful conditions created by the Green Revolution...

Índice

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Religion, Agriculture, and Sustainability
• 1. Our Flesh Was Made from Corn
• 2. Soils, Spirits, and the Cosmocentric Economy: Re-creating Amazonian Dark Earth in Peru
• 3. Renewal of Non-Western Methods for Sustainable Living
• 4. Nature Spirituality, Sustainable Agriculture, and the Nature/Culture Paradox: The Permaculture Scene in Lower Puna, Big Island of Hawaii
• 5. Hindu Traditions and Peasant Farming in the Himalayan Foothills of Nepal
• 6. Dharma for the Earth, Water, and Agriculture: Perspectives from the Swadhyaya
• 7. Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy: Practicing Food, Justice, and Sustainability in India
• 8. Thailand’s Moral Rice Revolution: Cultivating a Collective Ecological Consciousness
• 9. The Seven Species and Their Relevance to Sustainable Agriculture in Israel Today
• 10. Tending the Garden of Eden: Sacred Jewish Agricultural Traditions
• 11. Religion, Local Community, and Sustainable Agriculture
• 12. Heideggerian Reflections on Three Mennonite Cookbooks and a Mennonite Farm in Northwest Ohio
• 13. Steward or Priest? The Possibilities of a Christian Chicken Farmer
• 14. Religion and Agriculture: How Islam Forms the Moral Core of SEKEM’s Holistic Development Approach in Egypt
• 15. Tohono O’odham Himdag and Agri/Culture
• Conclusion: Searching for Annapurna; or, Cultivating Earthbound Regenerative Abundance in the Anthropocene
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index