Searching for Ancestral Wisdom after an Agrochemical Invasion

From the dry peaks of the Andes to the rainy forests of the lowlands, Ecuador is a land of contrasts. The divide between chemical-intensive agriculture and traditional farming is no exception. After decades of damaging pesticide use, a potent agroecology movement towards food sovereignty and ecosystem health is gaining ground. Meanwhile, the agrochemical industry maneuvers to expand its market in the wake of extreme weather events and recent regulatory rollbacks. As demand for organic and sustainably grown food rises in the global north, consumers and investors have a clear choice. Support the farmers practicing traditional agroecology? Or step aside for agribusiness as usual?

. . .

A rocky start

I was standing in a chemically-overdosed and disease-ridden cacao plantation with two young men from the nearest village, trying to look authoritative. My partner and I had already accepted the challenge to transform a muddy cow pasture into a productive multilayered food forest. Now we had taken on another assignment: to restore health to over 1200 cacao trees, most of them sick with a virulent fungal blight called monilla.

*Cacao needs just the right mixture of sun and shade to thrive.*

First, I explained, take all of the bad pods off each tree so the monilla stops spreading. My new employees, Yandre and Kevin, looked at me like I had asked them to grow wings and fly. But Patrona, Yandre protested, you can just spray fungicide. Well, I replied, that won’t fix the real problem. I pointed up at the dense tangle of branches overhead. The trees aren’t getting enough air and sunlight. That’s why there’s all this monilla. They glanced at each other, side-eye. I pretended not to notice. And after you prune each cacao tree, I went on, cut the big branches into pieces and spread them around each tree to fertilize them and shade out the weeds. Now skepticism was plain on their faces. But Patrona, Kevin asked with a shade of contempt, why don’t you just burn it?

. . .

These young men weren’t being lazy or wantonly destructive. They were simply conforming to the norm. Here, quemar el monte -- to “burn” unwanted vegetation with herbicide like glyphosate -- is the usual practice. In our rainy, humid corner of northwest Ecuador, fungal diseases are a common problem. The common solution is to spray fungicides. And here I was, la gringa loca, asking them to do things differently. Their questions were no surprise.

Up to this point, I hadn't come up with a satisfactory answer. Chemicals harm the soil sounds preachy and condescending. After a few applications of herbicide, the soil turns into a dull and lifeless gray dust. The locals refer to chemicals as veneno--poison. Obviously, they know it’s bad. I don’t have to tell them.

I looked over their clothing: Adidas track pants, T-shirts. Unlike their gringa boss, they never seemed to get mosquito bites. I could say, You don’t have the right gear to protect you from the chemicals. But I had seen people spraying herbicide in track pants and T-shirts often enough here to know they would scoff at such cautions.

Then it came to me. They know about trying to make a living. Show them the money.

Look, I said, I have a budget to get this job done. I can pay you -- or I can go buy the poison and spray it myself. I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. And you can go home. Which do you prefer?

Surprised, they looked at each other, then at me, with more respect. I need to work, Yandre said. Me too, Kevin agreed. Bueno, I said, handing each one a big pair of pruning shears. Vámonos.

. . .

The bigger pesticide picture

The casual acceptance of agrochemicals expressed here reflects the larger reality. Walk into any agro-ferreteria -- combination hardware and farm supply store -- in a cash-crop growing area of Ecuador and you will find aisles well-stocked with bottles and packets of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and NPK fertilizers. A 2016 study concluded that agrochemicals were applied to approximately 50% of permanent crops and 75% of temporary crops country wide. 25% of these chemicals fall into the "hazardous" or "very hazardous" category. No special license or certification to use them is required. Literally anyone can walk in off the street and order up a toxic chemical cocktail.

Chemical inputs are expensive, not only in absolute dollars but also how the cost eats into the farmers' already emaciated profit margin. The diseased cacao farm I was on a mission to rehabilitate had been sold to us by our neighbor, an affable fellow named Marco. I asked him if he had kept any records of his revenues and costs. I was surprised when a week later, he stopped by with a dog-earned notebook showing exactly that. When I looked at the numbers, I was hardly surprised that he sold the farm. After subtracting his expenses from the money he generated selling cacao to the local buyer, only a few hundred dollars remained as profit -- for the entire year. Nearly half of his total expenses were for various chemical inputs. The other half was for hands-on labor.

Hmm, I thought while studying the paper he gave me. Looks like he only pruned the trees once last year. I had been reading about more vigorous and regular pruning techniques that had nearly doubled production on cacao farms in Peru. Good pruning would lessen the need for fungicide. Plus, I figured, if we slashed the weeds and left them to compost in place instead of burning them, we could stop using herbicide and the green mulch would provide fertilizer. It certainly sounded plausible. But the only way I would know would be to put my ideas into practice.

Change is never easy

It was slow going at first. Just taking down all of the diseased fruit took weeks and a careful rigorous pruning even longer. The cacao trees were struggling to stay alive in the dull powdery soil. Without the usual jolts of chemical NPK, they barely produced fruit. Yandre and Kevin worked in gloomy silence. No one likes to work on an unproductive farm. The chemicals killed all of the soil life, I told them. It's going to take some time to recover. I only hoped I would be proven right.

My goodness, my gentle first-world readers might well be thinking, how awful for these people to use these toxic chemicals! Why don't they know better? Indeed, just last week some environmentally conscious expats I know commented on social media about the sprayed corn farms in their area of Ecuador: I don’t know what to say to the people who are growing the corn that would make them stop poisoning the Earth, the village, and the rivers, my fellow Americans lamented.

Well, I replied, perhaps you can start by acknowledging where the chemicals come from, how they got into Ecuador, and who sold them to the people here. The labels on the agrochemical bottles clearly display familiar names of corporate giants or subsidiaries spawned by parent companies in the global north. Latin America accounts for more than a quarter of Bayer Crop Science's market.

Since the early 1990s, the chemical consortium has aggressively marketed their products, often with the cooperation of state sponsorship, under the guise of "training programs" on the safe use of pesticides (SUP). While the agribusiness giants flout their "sustainability pillars" on their stylish websites, fewer than one in five Ecuadorian farmers receives any sort of training in pesticide safety.

Agribusiness doesn't even bat an eye when it comes to targeting an impressionable audience: children. In 2001, five leading agrochemical companies launched a program aimed directly at rural children 10-15 years of age. With the Disney-worthy name “Scarecrow in Defence of Nature," the campaign resolved to "change the mentality of adults through their children and to form tomorrow’s farmers with information on the Correct Use of Products for Crop Protection and Integrated Pest Management." To make learning about agrochemicals fun, the "Scarecrow" program featured activities like field days and drawing contests with rewards for the winners.

So much for “teach the children well.”

As an expatriate of the global north myself, I can hardly find fault with my neighbors in Ecuador for using pesticides. They are only doing what they learned in school, courtesy of the global north.

*Kevin and Yandre, with a haul of chemical-free cacao*

Climate Change as “potential for growth”

Today, even flimsy protections are waning as Ecuador’s new right-leaning government rapidly dismantles the regulatory infrastructure. The agrochemical consortium could not be more pleased. In a September 2021 article published on AgriBusiness Global, the industry lauds the easing of “formerly harsh restrictions on imported pesticides” in Ecuador as a “promising development.”

Meanwhile, the industry presents worsening weather events as “opportunities'' to expand its market as the risks to farmers increase. In a quote from the same article, a representative for Bayer CropLife Latin America states, “There is always potential for growth, regardless of climate changes. Drought increases opportunities for insecticides and intense rainy seasons for fungicides and herbicides.”

Go ahead. Read that again, I'll wait.

Perhaps, my northern compatriots, instead of asking, What can I say to people spraying poison on the Earth?

You can ask, What can I do to incentivize farmers to cultivate crops without chemicals? What choices can I make in the global marketplace that could bring about change?

Two Sides

I’ve been living and working on the land in a rural community for six years now. My time here has opened my eyes to the realities of farming in Ecuador. I say "realities" because there are really two sides to the story.

One side is dominated by vast monoculture plantations, often owned by absentee landlords with no connection to the land. Low-wage laborers extract the produce and trucks transport it to cargo ships destined for the global north. Export-driven commodities like sugar, bulk cacao, roses, and rice account for the majority of pesticide and fertilizer use. Clearly, agrochemical use in Ecuador is directly related to the influence, expectations, and fluctuating markets of the global north.

On the other hand, there are thousands of small farms providing food for their families and surrounding villages. In the Sierra, every home with a bit of land attached to it will have a fig tree, a stand of corn plants, and a pumpkin patch. In the warm lowlands, even the most ramshackle dwellings will sport clumps of manioc, plantains, and at least one orange or lemon tree. In the town where we shop on weekends, farmers line the main street with wheelbarrows heaped with avocados, tangerines, and local specialties like peach palm and sapote, cultivated in the "multi strata agroforestry systems" that inspired what we now call Permaculture.

In addition to the wealth of indigenous farming knowledge, Ecuador is home to a lively new agroecology movement. While governance at the national level fails to make a concerted stand against agrochemical incursions, thousands of grass-roots social groups have sprung up in recent years independently of funding from the government or the big NGOs. More pragmatic than ideological, these dispersed communities focus on actionable ways like regional seed exchanges and cooperative food markets to make the concept "food sovereignty" a real thing for ordinary people.

Colonizer Vibes

*A Yumbo native with a bounty of assorted fruit harvested from a multilayered food forest, c1570*

After two years of struggling to make progress with our food forest, Juan and I finally met some people who had successfully regenerated deforested land via Agroforestry. For the first time, I saw rare heirloom cacao trees growing amidst a fragrant forest of exotic fruits, native timber, and valuable spices like vanilla and cardamom. I learned how to use fast-growing “pioneer” plants to establish a shade canopy and provide organic matter to the fragile soil. For the first time, I felt hopeful.

At the same time, I felt a nagging discomfort. Amongst our new allies, the majority were born or educated in the global north. They used words I recognized from Permaculture and Syntropic Agroforestry, systems popular with North Americans, Europeans and Australians -- other white people. I had learned that the Yumbo Indians had once cultivated sophisticated agroforestry systems in the Choco-Andino corridor I now called home. Had invasion, disease, and the Green Revolution so thoroughly wiped out indigenous farming knowledge that the local people had to be “re-educated” by outsiders? Was there any ancestral wisdom remaining? Where could I find it?

Back on our farm, we got to work. We planted hundreds of banana and plantain cuttings to establish a canopy for heirloom Nacional cacao, the primary target crop of our food forest. I had to keep reminding my employees to leave additional space to interplant the cacao later. Finally, one of them asked me, Ah Patrona, are you going to plant the yellow cacao? I looked up from the hole I was digging, startled. The pods of Nacional cacao are yellow. Unlike the "red cacao," new hybrids engineered to withstand full sun, Nacional thrives in the dappled shade of other trees. Sí, I replied, el Nacional. He nodded as if everything now made sense. Claro, he confirmed, the yellow cacao needs the company of the bananas.

So they did know things after all.

*Heirloom Nacional cacao thriving under a canopy of bananas*

Actually, their attitudes toward my gringa loca ideas had been steadily improving as the harvests in the plantation they tended began to increase dramatically. Simply by removing the diseased pods, careful pruning, and adding mulch, the previously sick trees were rebounding vigorously. Kevin and Yandre were impressed. Energy and pride replaced listless skepticism. I couldn’t help but grin when one day they told me, Patrona, there's more cacao than any other finca around here...It's like an explosion of cacao!

They grinned too when I handed them each a big tip. My gamble on nature had paid off. Not only had the cacao harvest increased to 30% over the national average, I had been able to cut costs modestly by paying living breathing people to work in varied and thoughtful ways cultivating life instead of buying chemicals that only spread death. And to be honest, had I not paid my employees a good cut above the so-called "fair trade" rate, I could have profited more. The investment, however, was well worth it. Now they would gladly boast about the productivity of the healthier trees to their friends and neighbors. And they did just that.

When the bananas in the other field grew tall enough to provide shade and shelter, we planted the heirloom cacao seedlings along with a variety of native fruit and timber. One day, I came out to the field and found Yandre already working, clipping the large lower leaves from the tall banana plants and piling them around each cacao sapling. In Permaculture, this technique is called “chop and drop.” Syntropic Agroforestry calls it the “senescence phase.” And here was this young man, conditioned to pesticide use from childhood by an insidious industry, doing this task without any prompting from me.

Buenos días, I said in greeting. I pointed with my machete at the leaves he was cutting, how did you know I was going to ask you to do that? Then, I finally got my answer. My grandmother has these yellow cacao trees. This is how she gives them abonos. I was stunned. Abonos means fertilizer, in this case, not from a bottle, but from the earth. The old ways weren’t dead after all. In spite of every conceivable effort to smother them, they were only a generation away. This is how my grandmother does it.

Why didn’t you tell me this before? I asked. He shrugged as he replied, I don’t know, I guess I forgot. Well, I said, It’s good to remember the old ways. Sometimes they work best.

. . .

Since that day, I have had dozens more conversations with local people about companion plants, bird migrations, moon phases, weather patterns, and water cycles. I participated in a seed exchange where, next to a blazing fire pit, I listened to indigenous farmers tell stories and sing songs about jaguar spirits and grandfather trees. People have not yet forgotten their ancestral ways, despite every shiny new ploy agribusiness makes to squelch them in chemical-laced mud.

*Yandre unearths some ancestral wisdom, along with an impressive cassava harvest*

Down with Imperialsmo Clandestino!

It's high time for the woke eco-warriors of the global north to

1. Acknowledge the neo-colonialist agribusiness agenda.

2. Stop playing along because they want cheap stuff.

First-world consumers can move the needle for agroecology by demanding -- and paying for -- chemical-free products. Goods like heirloom cacao, medicinal herbs, exotic spices, and shade-grown coffee only grow in diverse and healthy ecosystems cultivated by farmers with an intimate knowledge of their craft. It's a simple equation. Without ecologically wise farmers in the global south, there will be no more dark chocolate, vanilla ice cream, turmeric lattes, acai bowls, or Ayahuasca ceremonies for the global north.

When it comes to "the real money" needed to fund transitions from chemical intensive agriculture to agroecology, impact investors need to take a broader view of "return on investment." A holistic portfolio would prioritize ecosystem restoration, economic justice, and species preservation -- including our own.

Farmers in Ecuador do not need more clandestine imperialism disguised as paternalistic aid or "agronomy training" programs. They are the rightful stewards of their land. The real opportunity for the global north lies in acknowledging the immense value of indigenous farming knowledge and creating true partnerships with the people who practice it.

Epilogue

After another year of working with me on the farm, Kevin went to stay with his mom in Peru and Yandre invested his saved wages in his goal to become a certified mechanic. In their stead, I hired Yandre’s younger sister Mayerly and her cousin Joanna. And let me tell you, these two women kick butt. They are smart, serious, and already knew how I wanted things done here — because Yandre had proudly informed them, No poison but lots of cacao!

At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,

--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building and the use of agroforestry methods.

That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and local community.

Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.

Kristen Krash is the co-founder and director of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism, and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature.