Sustainable Agriculture
The increased importance of the technicians and experts within the MST has led some sections of the movement to strive to develop and diffuse technology suitable with a model of sustainable agriculture on the lands the families farm. Such self-developed technology is seen as a means for turning small producers from consumers to producers of technologies - and therefore as a hedge against small producers' dependence on chemical inputs and single-crop price fluctuations as well as a way of preserving natural resources. These efforts are gaining increasing importance as movement families gain access to the land. For example, the Chico Mendes Center for Agroecology, founded May 15, 2004 in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil on land formerly used by Monsanto Company to grow genetically modified crops, intends to produce organic, native seed to distribute through MST. Various other experiments in reforestation, taming of native species and medicinal uses of plant life have been carried around the MST settlements.
In 2005, the MST partnered with the Federal Government of Venezuela, and the State Government of Paraná, the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), and the International Via Campesina (an organization that brings together movements involved in the struggle for land from all over the world), to establish the Latin American School of Agroecology. The school is located within an MST agrarian reform project known as the Contestado settlement. The protocol of intentions for its creation was signed in January during the fifth World Social Forum.
Read more about this topic: Landless Workers' Movement
Famous quotes containing the word agriculture:
“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)