Food Sovereignty and Indigenous World-Building

Cultivando Comunidad

We often think of food sovereignty as a response to not having enough food to eat. However, throughout Latin America (Abya Yala) and the Caribbean, people do not have enough food because they have been dispossessed from their territories, not because the land cannot produce. In response, the food sovereignty movement, which has placed Indigenous communities in the Global South at the forefront, is working on a local level to find answers. To put it simply, building food sovereign futures is about building food sovereign worlds. Examples can be found from Puerto Rico to Venezuela to Mexico and beyond.

First a bit of background: Ojibwe activist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke once said, “Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us.” The right to territorial sovereignty—to be in relation and in proximity to one’s land—has been decisive for Indigenous world-building, specifically to produce food. The cultivation of land by Indigenous peoples across Abya Yala and the Caribbean has been key for maintaining self-sufficient food systems and socio-communal relations despite capitalistic initiatives of extraction, exploitation, dispossession and privatization. To eradicate and privatize indigenous lands also means halting Indigenous food systems that help us survive and make us thrive. If capitalistic mechanisms carry colonial logics— expropriation and excavation—of lands for profit and empire-building, here we want to highlight Indigenous peoples’ counter-offensives to retake, maintain and cultivate the land for food production.

Food Sovereignty Across the Americas and the Caribbean

Puerto Rico produced much domestic agriculture until 1940 but by 2019, the gross domestic production of locally grown goods diminished to 2%. This radical decline has to do with natural disasters and more precisely through the Jones Act and Operation Bootstrap. The former has regulated maritime transport to and from the island since 1920 while the latter has sought to “modernize” the colony through industrialization initiatives implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. The Jones Act resulted in large tariffs for transportation of goods, including on local products grown by farmers. Operation Bootstrap resulted in the decline of agricultural food systems, supplanted by foreign companies’ offerings of industrial jobs (cheap labor).

Today’s descendants of the Taínos, the original Indigenous inhabitants of the island,  however, are developing self-sufficient systems, critical for a fertile, resource-rich island that imports over 80% of its food. Practices of autogestión on the island have become more visible after the failed aid and support of the United States during and after Hurricane Maria (specifically during Covid-19). These self- and community-supporting tactics have been enacted in the island through agroecological methods that take advantage of the environmental surroundings, natural assets and fertile ground, with minimum use of pesticides, to foster locally grown products and to avoid highly taxed and priced imported agricultural goods.

Some examples include El Pretexto, a culinary farm in Cayey, Puerto Rico, and the agroecological initiative  Para la naturaleza, that focuses on conserving the ecology of the island for a sustainable future. The Conuco Campesino program in the island also offers sowing and planting workshops to be carried out in family and community-based farms.  The Conuco, from which the collective takes its name, historically—before and during the colonial era— has been a space of food production for the Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, the greater Antilles and South America, and the Taínos (as they were named from the 19th century and on). Following Nelson Maldonado Torres’ contention for coalitional decolonial thinking across all continents, we want to emphasize that the practice of food sovereignty connects Indigenous peoples across the Americas and the world. The Conuco in the Greater Caribbean (which includes Venezuela and which we emphasize below), as such, operates as a case of decolonial practice for food autonomy that moves beyond colonial logics of territorial exploitation. We emphasize these initiatives in the colony as forms of both endurance and resistance to colonial capture and exhaustion, as a blueprint for food sovereignty methodologies across the hemisphere.

Planting Training for the Asociación Mayagüezana de Personas con Impedimentos (AMPI) by Conuco Campesino

Other forms of food autonomy can be found across Abya Yala. In the Andes and part of the Amazons—interconnected with Venezuela—, the chagra has been a source of food sovereignty. The chagra is an alimentary system that includes the selection and collection of seeds, the healing of the land, the cultivation and caring for the land. The chagra is a way of life, of working together, of sustenance and of being with one another. In Oaxaca, Mexico, Indigenous peoples across the region plant, grow and cultivate maíz (corn)to make tortillas and tlayudas (big tortillas) to sell in larger cities for economic sustenance. The maíz is also ground and cooked at home on a griddle known as a comal.  Maíz, a source for a daily food of survival, is used to make tejate, a Zapotec and Mixtec drink combined with cacao; it used also to make atole (another beverage) and to cook dishes like seguesa (sauce based with ground maíz). More importantly, maíz is pivotal for the Zapotec and Mixtec action of reciprocity—for the guelaguetza—in which corn products can be exchanged for beans, eggs, bread and other products, and vice versa. The practice of guelaguetza is grounded on the exchange of agricultural goods in which mutual aid among Indigenous communities can be repaid and reciprocated later in times of need.

In Chiapas, Mexico, the members of the Consejo Clandestino Revolucionario Indigena (CCRI), supported by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), grow and harvest their own maíz for sustenance and to aid (non-) Indigenous territories across Mexico, Cuba and elsewhere. In La otra campaña (see the Sexta Declaración Zapatista de la Selva Lacandona), led by Subcomandante Marcos, maíz was a key element to show support and alliance with Indigenous peoples across Mexico. Thus, the right to claim territorial ownership and to cultivate the land for food production across Indigenous lands is, in this sense, a way to decontinentalize the world, where what can connect Indigenous peoples is the act of cultivating their own food for sustenance and the creation of local economies.

Conucos In Venezuela

The Conucos in Venezuela are a showcase a reimagining of the world through food sovereignty.

Grounded in its Caribbean roots, the Conuco perpetually imagines and reimagines the region. This Indigenous agro-system of Arawakan descent has grown to reflect the cultural and ecological diversity of Abya Yala and the Caribbean. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, Taíno communities in the Greater Antilles harvested manioc, potatoes, beans and other crops in their Conucos. As a practice, it continued to spread during Spanish colonization and was referred to as the plantation-Conuco system, in which enslaved Africans would provide labor for large-scale industrial monoculture and then cultivate small Conucos to provide subsistence for themselves.

The soon-to-come Green Revolution would later become one of the Conuco’s greatest foes. The green movement sought to transform and modernize the Global South’s food system to align with Western ideals and capitalist interests. This called for state-sponsored stigmatization of Conucos and conuquer@s, as those who farm their Conucos are known. Being called a conuquer@ was understood as pejorative and having a Conuco was deemed “archaic.” With the current ongoing political and economic crisis, Venezuelans are now once again looking towards the Conuco as a source of hope and prosperity.

The Conuco has grounded itself in certain principles, such as increasing interactions that promote agrobiodiversity and sustainability. The way Conucos are cultivated varies from community to community, landscape to landscape. Still, there are key characteristics that distinguish it from Green Revolution-esque industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture is normally set up as monocultures, in which a single crop is widely planted across a plot of land until the soil is drained of its nutrients. An utmost important feature of Conucos is the integration of polyculture techniques by planting various rotating crops together. Oftentimes, this rotation includes such crops as corn, watermelon, bananas, plantains, taro, yams, yucca and cacao. Just as human communities benefit from working together in community, so do our plant relatives. Plants shape and contour their soils, the living digestive system of the agro-system. Here, each actor in the Conuco contributes and acquires what it needs to flourish and blossom. This serves as the regenerative foundation of the Conuco — the flows of life and energy that circle through our lands.

The flow of not just nutrients but also knowledge and wisdom are central to the Conuco. Oral history is often the main avenue for communities to pass on this ecological knowledge to future generations. Communities share advice with each other, sometimes in weekend-long festivals such as the Fiesta de San Juan in Curiepe  that cultivate collective memory and identity. The Conuco relies just as much on these socio-cultural practices as it does on the ecological ones. This goes to show that there might not be as much truth in the colonial distinction between nature and culture as Western society might believe there is. The Conuco, thus, embodies the potential this world can have through human and non-human community collaboration and solidarity.

La Fiesta De San Juan Bautista in Curiepe, Miranda State (2022) Photo by Prensa Miranda

Understanding its empowering potential, Venezuelan communities have returned to the ancestral Caribbean practice of the Conuco, in response to the widespread food insecurity the country faces. During these moments of institutional and systemic failure, communities have worked towards autogestión, or self-reliance. At a time when 57% of its people are considered “food deprived”, communities turn to themselves when they cannot rely on the state. The Conuco resurfaces as a symbiosis of care. Conuquer@s care for their Conuco by tending to it, and in return, the Conuco cares for the Conuquer@ by gifting them food to eat.

Nevertheless, the Venezuelan state has simultaneously worked to co-opt the Conuco and dispossess Indigenous and Black communities from theirs. The government’s Plan De La Patria 2025 clearly recognizes and energizes the Conuco as a biocultural heritage. It explicitly proclaims, “Relaunch the recognition of the Conuco as a historical source and generate training and/or training centers for the Campesino sector, in order to preserve our agrobiodiversity…” (14; our translation). Despite this rhetoric, Venezuela’s state-owned extractive industries have perpetuated colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples. For instance, Yukpa communities were dispossessed from their territory in the Sierra de Perijá by the state to accommodate industrial monocultures, disrupting the flow of knowledge cultivated and regenerated through their Conucos. The Conuco has historically been under attack, yet its strength and that of the communities that cultivate it persevere. When colonization works to attack the Conuco, its revitalization functions to decolonize.

The climate crisis makes regenerative agriculture even more important. The quality of soil has just as much of a global implication as local. While soil health helps communities thrive on a local level, soil health simultaneously also helps capture carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change, in the atmosphere. Once fixated in the soil, carbon is in a form that plants can then extract and use. The regenerative nature of agro-systems like the Conuco encourages this process, which has been considered a natural climate solution. The well-being of Indigenous communities and their lands is the well-being of our planet and its future.

Food Sovereignty + Indigenous World-Building

Coined by La Vía Campesina in 1996, food sovereignty refers to “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” Food sovereignty highlights how the cultural and the ecological are not distinct, instead, they function as a system of perpetual reciprocity. Food serves as a site to remember the past to forge a future.

Food systems are all-encompassing. It includes the social as much as the ecological, humans as much as the non-human, and the living as much as the non-living. We want to emphasize that these binaries are not inherent truths but rather realities constructed by colonial histories and structures. If anything, Indigenous agro-ecologies shine light on how we, human and non-human, are different yet connected, not the same but equal. Food connects us all. It can be seen as the flow of life and energy of everything that resides on our planet. The use of the chagra in the Andean region, for example, constitutes for the Quechua people their worldview sumak kawsay (“living well” or “good living”) in which indigenous peoples are in harmonious cohabitation with the land, the products born therein, and the surroundings. The chagra rooted in the landscape is what holds indigenous communities’ world-building strategies of continuity.

Indeed, Indigeneous communities’ cosmovisions attached to food systems symbiotically work on various planes, from the cultural to the ecological and the material to the spiritual. Food system as a conduit between people and their lands is essential to Indigenous world-building. The world we experience is based on the ways we know, become, and belong to our communities and our landscapes, and our mutual relationalities. The cultural and ecological practices associated with Indigenous modes of agriculture work in a cyclical fashion to keep each other alive. Agro-systems, such as the Chagra and the Conuco, perform to hold and intergenerationally pass on these ways of knowing, becoming, and belonging. For the indigenous people of the CCRI in the Chiapas region, territorial sovereignty is not only important for food production, but also for autonomous forms of governance. The CCRI with the EZLN have instituted since the 1990s caracoles–communities of self-government–where they delegate power among the community members, where women participate, where educational programs are instituted, where rotation of rule occurs, and where indigenous usos and costumbres are not occluded.

Indigenous world-building is not simply about sustaining the present but also about imagining a future. The Green Revolution in Venezuela, by attempting at a monopoly over agriculture, attempted to monopolize the future. In contrast, food sovereignty which urges for the protection and revitalizing diverse modes of knowing and being in relation to the land, holds stakes in a diverse future. It is dedicated to fostering as the EZLN proclaimed in 1996  un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos. A world where Indigenous community-making is enlivened by food sovereignty practices’ attachments to territorial autonomy.