As the glamour of the Green Revolution is withering away, there has emerged a movement towards finding uncostly, environmentally benign, and productive alternatives which will incorporate rather than exclude the peasant farmer. Consequently, because of the self-replenishing, low-input, and sustainable nature of chinampa agriculture, there have been efforts to implement this system outside of the Valley of Mexico.
The Mexican Instituto des Investigacionares sobre los Recursos Bioticos (INIREB) revealed such plans in the mid-1970s. According to Mac Chapin, transplanting chinampas had a “romantic patina about it” and was pronounced as “‘an old answer to the future,’ a phrase consciously used to suggest revitalization of a remnant of the glorious past” (Chapin 1988).
One of these INIREB
projects was launched in 1978 in the Tabascan swamps bordering the Chontal
Indian villages of Tucta, La Cruz, and Olcuatitan. The state government of Tabasco and the Instituto
Nacional Indigenista (INI) began constructing raised agricultural beds, which
they called camellones. The
goals for the project were as follows:
(1) provide the landless Chontales with permanent employment; (2) bring about self-sufficient food production in the area; (3) ensure a constant production of vegetables for the internal market of Villahermosa; (4) strengthen indigenous cultural identity; and (5) develop a real alternative for the incorporation of swampland into productive activities.
According to Chapin, none of the objectives had been brought forth by the Chontal community. Regardless of this fact, chinampa technology was introduced on a “grand scale.” Huge aquatic dredges were used in obtaining mud from the swamp bottom and heaping it in sixty-five piles approximately thirty meters across and 100 to 300 meters in length. Although these mounds physically resembled chinampas, they lacked both fertility and porosity. The very structure of the mounds was actually inverted. The richest soil lay covered on the bottom, while the surface was “covered with sterile clay that hardened like cement when exposed to the air.”
Moreover, the imposed chinampas failed to match the Tabasco area and the Chontal Indians in quite a few respects. The INI organized the Chontales in collective workgroups, a form of labor completely alien to them. In terms of the crops, technicians taught the Chontales how to grow vegetables that were both exotic to the region and to the Chontales. Chinamperos, brought from the Valley of Mexico as advisors, were met with a large volume of unfamiliar insects. They responded by using large amounts of chemical pesticides. Growing seasons for crops also differed from that of the Valley. Despite these “snags and confusion,” the first harvest was “reasonably good.” Chapin asserts that the payment of wages had “mitigated” problems.
The Chontales and INIREB technicians were soon confronted with another dilemma: “Despite all of the technical expertise poured into the project, no one had researched the market situation, and no arrangements had been made for transporting and selling the highly perishable produce” (Chapin 1988). And so the crops either rotted or were sold at incredibly low prices to whole-sale buyers: “economic shambles.”
As the Chontales began having more input into the project, transformations took place. Bridges were constructed to facilitate travel by foot. The communal beds were divided among individual families, and the Chontales returned to growing subsistence crops like corn, beans, and bananas, along with some fruit trees, in place of labor and capital-intensive vegetable gardening. This enables the Chontales to both tend to their crops and pursue wage labor in nearby Villahermosa. As of 1988, “only some of the more enterprising farmers [were] moving, cautiously and on a small scale, back into cash crops.”
Chapin also reviews another INIREB chinampa project in the Veracruz village of El Castillo. According to Chapin, the biggest obstacle to this project was lack of community interest. When INIREB approached the town about building chinampas, only one person, a teenager named Imeldo Mendez, spoke up and expressed interest. And so four chinampa beds, each measuring thirty by eight meters and separated by three meter wide canals, were constructed on Imeldo’s lake side property under the direction of a chinampero. Although yields of cabbages, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, beans, Swiss chard, and coriander were “impressive,” marketing proved yet again to be a problem. Unfortunately, at this time, Imeldo drowned. With his death, interest in the project subsided, INIREB withdrew funding, and the farm was abandoned..
And so what are the lessons from these well-intended INIREB endeavors? Local participation at the decision-making level is key. Gomez-Pompa and Jimenez-Osornio (1989) attribute the fact that INIREB, not farmers, identified the need for agricultural intensification as being an obstacle to success. Chapin (1991) is quite just when he states that “research of a practical nature must be oriented, from the start, by the concerns of the farmers’ themselves.”
Moreover, failure in transplanting the chinampa model can also be attributed to its dismatch to local conditions. While the chinampas prove to be very productive in the central Mexican highlands, it is erroneous to assume that they would be well-adapted to a lowland, humid, tropical, insect-infested environment. The sustainability and suitability of an agrosystem is most dependent on how well it matches the ecology, climate, soil, and topography of a locale, along with the culture of its inhabitants. Because each locale is unique, one can not impose a model and expect success.
Although Gliessman (1991) acknowledges and accedes to many of Chapin’s critiques of the INIREB projects, he still finds potential in such endeavors. He finds funding to be a large obstacle in successfully implementing alternative, traditional agroecosystems. It is true that the chinampas were not a perfect match to the Tabascan and Veracruzan regions, but just when adaptations were being made to the system so that it could conform and mesh with that particular locale and the culture of the people themselves, the funding stopped coming. Gliessman states, “by the time better agricultural soil had finally began to form, and farmers began to plant crops that were more adapted to the region, almost all economic and technical support had dried up.” Gliessman argues that if long-term funding was available, success, through trial and error, would inevitably be achieved. The agroecosystem would be given the chance to evolve and adapt. For instance, in response to problems with soil sterility, cacao and other organic materials were added to the Chontale chinampas and so enriched the soil (Gomez-Pompa & Jimenez-Osornio 1989). Gliessman believes that “the raised bed agroecosystem model in its many forms is still a potentially very viable model form which to work.”
The challenge, then, is to how to learn from these systems [e.g. chinampas]
in order to design and manage present day systems that maintain an independence
from large quantities of imported purchased inputs, and that can be adapted
to varying environmental and cultural conditions. This is a process that takes time and resources,
and cannot be expected to be successful in all aspects of short periods of
time. Agricultural development is
as much an ecological and evolutionary process as it is an economic one (Gliessman
1991).
It should be noted that the INIREB project was implemented prior to any comprehensive studies on prehistoric wetland management in the area had been undertaken. This could definitely be considered a handicap, since INIREB technicians were unable to apply local technologies.
Chapin (1991) offers academics advice in their crusade to preserve biological and cultural biodiversity and halt environmental degradation:
While they often have valuable technical expertise, together with an all-important
ecological perspective, their formal training has seldom equipped them to
deal with the reality of life in rural communities, where politics, economics,
and social interaction are inextricably melded with agricultural technologies.
The discipline of biology—and to a lesser, yet still significant, extent
anthropology—does not expose students to applied research and practical work
with peasant farmers. Until this situation
changes, a large portion of the ongoing ecodevelopment research, as well as
the attempts at implementation that flow from it, will remain unfocused, irrelevant,
and ineffective.