Family farms

Christian Century, May 9, 2001 by Ben Jacques

WE SIT ON makeshift stools in the shade of a large yuyuga tree beside the workhouse, a typical farm structure with bamboo and mud walls and a tin roof. A few steps away in the stables, calves wait for their feeding. On the slope below, several dozen goats graze on the hillside. Further down, toward the Ulua River that winds north through the rugged Honduran mountains, children take sheep to pasture.

The men who sit with me are fathers and grandfathers, campesino leaders of the CAPTAL collective farm in the town of Concepcion del Norte. One has just arrived on horseback. Another has come up from the fields, placing his machete on the ground beside him. Nearby a grandson scoots up the trunk of a tree for a better view.

After saludos and bienvenidos--handshakes and welcomes--Hernan Rene Rios, the collective's leader, begins to tell the story of the CAPTAL campesino families. Translating for me is my guide, Tim Wheeler, a Presbyterian Church missionary assigned to work with the Christian Commission for Development (CCD) and Heifer Project International (HPI). In a country marked by abject poverty Tim and his wife, Gloria, provide coordination and support to a wide range of projects that enable poor families to achieve self-reliance, health and dignity.

Thanking God for our visit, Don Hernan begins with the good news. Although the farmers lost their corn and bean crops to Hurricane Mitch in 1998, no animals were lost. In fact, 23 calves have been born this year. The cattle, a mix of hardy, cream-colored Brahmin, and Brown Swiss, are giving good milk, as are the dairy goats, black-and-white alpines and floppy-eared nubians. Last month the animals gave 5,546 bottles of milk. This means that there is plenty for everyone in the collective and extra to sell or process into cheese.

"We have completely done away with malnutrition," Don Hernan says. And to make his point, he gestures to a boy and girl sitting on the barn stoop. "See how fat they are!" The children grin shyly. Which do they prefer, cow's milk or goat's? "Goat's milk," the boy responds. "Many families prefer goat's milk because it is so nutritious," Hernan states.

After the hurricane the collective had to rely on its animals. Those designated for meat were slaughtered and shared with all the families. And the cooperative continued to sell young animals to fund farm repairs, improvements, medicine and other necessities. They also decided to give two liters of milk a day to a widow in town whose house was washed away by El Mitch.

Although the farmers still face challenges--how to pay for seeds for the spring planting, how to obtain additional acreage to plant sugar cane, vegetables and forage crops, how to fund an irrigation system--they've come a long way in the past two decades. In 1980 they were desperate. They had neither land nor milk. The meager wages the men could earn as laborers on large farms did not pay for even the basic necessities. The children were malnourished and often sick.

That's when the families decided to organize and seek land where they could grow their own crops. Honduras has plenty of fertile land, but most of it belongs to wealthy plantation owners or foreign corporations like Standard Fruit or Chiquita Brand International, which produce bananas, coffee and other export crops. Hundreds of thousands of poor campesinos are forced to live and farm on the rugged sides of mountains. To make matters worse, traditional slash-and-bum techniques and the overharvesting of trees for firewood or lumber have led to widespread soil depletion and erosion.

In search of arable land, the campesinos sought to take advantage of Honduras' 1975 Agrarian Reform Law, which specified that landless farmers could claim unused land through a lengthy process of application and verification. Yet throughout the country campesinos making land claims were met with hostility, threats and violence. Some were arrested and jailed. A few were killed. "We were opposed by the ranchers in our own village," Don Hernan says. "They told us we could not do it, that we could not define our own destiny."

In 1980, staking out approximately 100 manzanas (one manzana equals 1.7 acres) of unused land on the slopes of the mountain, the Concepcion del Norte families bolstered their claim by moving onto the land and refusing to leave. With the strength of numbers and the support of churchpeople and agrarian reform advocates, their claim was eventually authorized.

Since then, however, land reform laws have repeatedly been weakened or nullified. In effect, the collective has been required to purchase the land it once claimed. Twenty-one years later, CAPTAL is in the final process of gaining a legal title to it.

In 1983 the farmers applied to a new ecumenical rural development agency, the Christian Commission for Development, for loans to plant corn and beans. Now providing community development services in over 400 villages and cities throughout Honduras, CCD provided the collective not only with money, but with training in organization and farming methods.