Community Development and Agroecology: Learning from CISERP
- margaretmaearney
- Jul 31, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 31
The Team as CISERP: From left to right:
Yareni, me, Cielo Lourdes, and Adolfo (not pictured-- Vicente)
April 15, 2023
Arriving to CISERP,
the Center for Research and Professional Services
El Centro de Investigación y Servicios Profesionales
I continued to reach out to more organizations in San Cristobal de Las Casas that work in rural development and agroecology. CISERP A.C. (Centro de Investigación y Servicios Profesionales) (in English, the Center for Research and Professional Services) was very receptive to receiving me. They are located just 20 minutes outside the city center of San Cristobal de las Casas. I took the bus, and as always, local people were friendly. The bus driver asked me where I was going and making sure I was headed in the right direction.
When I arrived to CISERP's office I was greeted by the director, Adolfo, who invited me to help him feed the rabbits, chickens and turkeys in the back of the property. Then two of the other teams members-- Yareni and Cielo Lourdes-- arrived. They generously served me many cups of coffee and gave me a powerpoint presentation explaining in detail their many rural development programs and services!
In this post I will give a description of the work that they carry out in rural, indigenous communities in Chiapas. Their team also invited me to join them for a field visit to a community they work with so I will also share the experience I had visiting their projects first hand!
Chatting with the director, Adolfo, as he fed the rabbits
An Overview of CISERP's Work
CISERP's strategic programs focus on:
Food sovereignty
Healthy homes
Family nutrition and hygiene
Water access
Income and savings
CISERP's mission is to offer technical services and trainings in integrated rural development for communities to achieve productive and sustainable practices that improve their quality of life.
For example, services and trainings in sustainable practices in agriculture aim to:
increase agricultural production
reduce the cost of production
generate value added to their products
cut out middle men from the process of both acquiring inputs and commercializing products
and, thus, improve the quality of life of the families and communities they work with
Through this model, ultimately, the vision is for families to live an improved quality of life by having access to healthy food and developing productive activities that generate employment and income.
CISERP's Work-
Responding to Local Challenges and Needs
1. Food Sovereignty: Agroecology & Food Production
CISERP's vision is to empower communities to be protagonists in their own development. This begins with a more efficient model of sustainable, agroecological agriculture that allows them to:
reduce their vulnerability to external factors that make them dependent
achieve greater self-sufficiency
develop their ability to self organize
develop new technical, commercial, and administrative skills
CISERP's team works with small-scale, farming families to diversify their production, reuse organic materials, promote food sovereignty, generate employment opportunities, and find local markets for their products. For example, one of their projects includes the production of mushrooms by using leftover organic materials from the corn harvest. This utilizes organic, locally-available materials without additional cost, can provide additional income and nutrition for the family, and generates local employment.
CISERP works with families to implement agroecological practices. Some of these practices include:
harvesting and sharing seeds
using natural fertilizers like the chicken poop and compost
adding corn husks, coffee shells, cow manure, and other local materials to the compost
vermiculture (compost with worms) which is a faster process than normal compost
As the team explained to me, rather than waiting on government packages of seeds and fertilizers or purchasing these inputs, these agroecological practices allow families to use the natural resources they have locally. To encourage more households to participate, CISERP carries out a cost comparison between agroecological methods and agrochemical methods to demonstrate how in the long term agroecological methods are more economical than buying chemical fertilizers.
Food Sovereignty Projects with a Focus on Agroecology
2. Food sovereignty: Seed Saving
Traditionally, indigenous communities have produced a variety of corns- yellow, white, red, blue/ black. However, the government sends out technical assistance packages that include hybrid and modified seeds that are not native varieties and cannot be collected and reproduced for a second harvest. Therefore, seed collecting and sharing is an important project to maintain local varieties and reduce the dependence on external inputs and packages. CISERP encourages sharing and trading seeds via community seed banks to ensure that varieties are available to community members who need them. Sharing seeds is a way for families to support one another through difficult periods and bad harvests.
3. Supporting Women and Recognizing Women's Work
Addressing the topic of gender is important in the context of communities in Mitontic. Despite the many tasks they carry out inside and outside the home, when you ask women from the communities what work they do, they often respond, "Yo no hago nada" "I don't do anything." In reality, women are in charge of everything that needs to be done in the home, agricultural work, making and selling artesanías, raising children, collecting water, tending to livestock, cooking, etc.
Women carry a heavy work load that is often unrecognized. This is often the case because much of the work that women carry out is unpaid. However, it is equally vital to the reproduction of the home as paid work is. Furthermore, men often migrate to other states in Mexico or the United States to work, and women stay behind taking care of the home, often with scarce financial resources. The CISERP team has seen that the gardens and patios are of great help to women because they have food for consumption and can also raise chickens for eggs. They can consume the eggs and chickens or sell them to generate income to buy household essentials like soap, rice, etc. When the men migrate, women are often defensoras del territorio, defenders and protectors of the land, planting the milpa and collecting the seeds. The workers from CISERP want this important female work to be more recognized.
4. Family Nutrition, Hygiene, and Health
Another project with women is in nutrition, hygiene, and health. In many communities, local, nutritious foods have been replaced by less healthy habits including drinking coca-cola. The CISERP teams finds that many meals consist only of beans and lack a diversity or variety of nutritional value. Therefore, the team at CISERP works with women to use a variety of vegetables from the patio gardens and recover recipes (such as tostadas) that contain fresh carrots, radishes, lettuce, and other vegetables growth locally.
Additionally, they look at the economic side of unhealthy habits such as consuming coca-cola. CISERP's team calculates how much the average family spends on coca-cola per day, week, and month, and discusses what families could invest the money in instead of consuming coca-cola. Chiapas is renowned for its high rates of coca-cola consumption, and even children as young as 6 months begin to consume coca-cola. This is tied to coca-cola's marketing that has targeted indigenous populations and has tied into indigenous practices and beliefs. For example, one indigenous belief is that burping releases bad spirits, and now coca-cola is used to provoke burping in indigenous ceremonies. Coke can even be found on the indigenous alters in ceremonies. In some places it is even easier to access coke than water. This has negatively impacted the health of people in Chiapas and also extracted local water supplies. There are reports on this in English such as this video.
CISERP also promotes practices in hygiene and health such as fuel efficient stoves. These stoves require less fire wood which means less labor and less deforestation. These stoves also prevent respiratory diseases because they do not fill homes with smoke like the open fires do.
Open fires vs the fuel efficient stoves
5. Access to Water
One of the largest obstacles in the communities of Mitontic is access to drinkable water. CISERP supports families in building cement cisterns for rainwater capture, which have a capacity of 18,000 liters. The families participate and everyone pitches in to help carry the materials of concrete, gravel, and sand up to their properties. The cisterns collect rainwater from the rooftops through a PBC pipe. The rainwater passes through a filter of gravel and sand that purifies the rainwater. However, this water is still not apt for consumption and families use an additional solar-powered filter provided by CISERP or boil the water before consumption. CISERP provides training for the use and maintenance of the cisterns and water. The team also provides additional information about hygiene and safety regarding water consumption.
The CISERP team emphasized how important this project is because without access to safe water, it is difficult to promote projects in health, hygiene, and agriculture. Everything depends on having access to clean water. Before CISERP supported with cisterns and filters, some of the water that families used looked like the photo below.
The water that families collected before CISERP provided cisterns and filters
Making Projects Sustainable
One of the major challenges the team mentioned is making these projects sustainable, which means ensuring that the local communities take ownership of them and continue even when CISERP and the team aren't there. When there have been shortages in funding, they find that participant families have discontinued some of the practices. Sometimes this is because the practices weren't clear enough to them or sometimes they find some families are less committed to implementing them on their own. This is a challenge that they continue to reflect on and reinforce. It takes time and follow up to instill new practices. This is a key questions for all development projects to reflect on..
A Conversation about Program Funding Sources
Adolfo and I had an interesting conversation about CISERP's funding sources. For 12 years they received funding from a government program for food security (seguridad alimentaria) under the presidency of Peña Nieto which they were able to continue until 2018. Then in 2018 with the change in government came changes to these programs. Adolfo explained that the new programs had less budgets for local organizations and instead of providing long-term trainings to rural communities and families, they often give packages of seeds and fertilizers or direct cash programs. Therefore, many local rural development organizations that worked with funding from the previous political administration have cut their staff or have closed operations.
With these changes, now CISERP has just four full-time staff members. They have pivoted to other funding sources such as funds from the Kellogg Foundation, Slow Food, One Equal Heart and, previously, Groundswell. They also have alliances with educational institutions nationally and abroad such as Chapingo, U. Earth in Costa Rica and La U.B. Benito J. Chenalhó. Now the work of securing different funding streams is more time consuming for CISERP, but they have managed and continue to offer their important services for sustainable rural development.
In addition to the challenging work of addressing complex social environmental problems, small local organizations also have to work hard to ensure funding to make them happen. Don Adolfo said that this is often complicated due to changes in political administrations and their rural policies and programs.
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