Sustainable, organic, and dignified
Language, life, and culture in the autonomous, Mayan communities of Chiapas, Mexico centereds around the growing of corn ~ and a wide variety of other crops. The ancestors of these modern day small farmers invented corn and today's generation is dedicated to educating their sons and daughters in truly sustainable farming methods. In fact, the preservation of their communities and culture depends on these ecological agricultural educational programs.
During the 1995 peace negotiations with the Mexican government, an important and very frustrated Zapatista representative stopped the flow of superficial official proposals with the speech paraphrased here, "Gentlemen, you don't seem to understand. I am a farmer. My father was a farmer and his father was a farmer as far back as we know. You don't seem to understand that we don't want your welfare handouts, your political positions are meaningless to us, and your factory jobs are what we oppose - we want our sons and daughters, their sons and daughters; to continue to be farmers on our own lands with our own languages and our own cultures and traditions. This is what we are fighting for and this is what we are willing to die for."
In the overall Zapatista education effort there is no higher priority than protecting the health and culture of the Mayan communities by educating for sustainable, organic, and dignified farming methods.
Click here to learn about the Mother Seeds in Resistance project which is designed to eliminate transgenic contaminations of native landraces of corn in Chiapas, Mexico.
Web Page Map for Ecological Agricultural Education:
Agro-Ecology Promoter Training
Mother Seeds in Resistence / GMO-Free Chiapas
Planting Trees in Chiapas, Mexico
The Other Abeja: Recouperating the tradition of Native stingless bees in Chiapas, Mexico
