[07/21/06] MST, La Vía Campesina & Venezuela to establish Latin American Institute of Agro-ecology "Paulo Freire"

La Vía Campesina will form an agro-ecological contingent in Latin America

Fausto Torrez

ATC, CLOC-Vía Campesina

An agreement of technical agrarian cooperation was signed by La Via Campesina -MST and the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela on September 26, 2005, in Sabaneta, which is in Alberto Arvelo Torrealba municipality of the state of Barinas, Venezuela.

President Hugo Chavez signed the agreement in the name of the Venezuelan government and João Pedro Stedile signed in the name of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and La Via Campesina.

One of the points establishes the need to develop all possible efforts to defend the principles of food sovereignty of our peoples, of protection and multiplication of native seeds of all types of farm production and in valuing peasant farming, the strengthening of the internal market and the search for new agrarian techniques that do not harm the environment and provide high quality food for our peoples.

In applying this agreement, a group of leaders and professionals from Latin American organizations and authorities of the Bolivarian University and the Ministry of Higher Education are in the final phase of creating an Agro-Ecological Institute with a specialization in Peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant Studies.

Its purpose is to train qualified activists for the organization and the development of agro-ecology, supporting the relations between technicians and peasant, indigenous, and afro-descendent organizations with a new ethic for the building of a new paradigm in the countryside of Latin America.

Training in humanistic, holistic, and scientific values will give a new conception to the thousands of young men and women who will strengthen the social movement in the countryside in the future, and will end up promoting a technology that is enriched with traditional knowledge and returns to practice, strengthening the food sovereignty of the peoples.

The first 250 students (50% women) begin the course in this institute in the month of September 2006, in the municipality Alberto Arvelo of the state of Barinas. This center operates within the framework of the Bolivarian Alliance of the American and of the agreements described above. In its first stage, students from the whole region will participate with Venezuelan and foreign teachers who have a high professional caliber. Above all, the school will use a participatory method that that combines social practice with school time and community time during a five year period until the student attains a professional degree.

The pedagogical method puts a focus on the classics of science without omitting traditional knowledge and the socio-cultural cosmic vision of the Indigenous and Afro-descendents. The result should be that the political thought of pedagogy is committed to the social dynamic of the popular struggle, an education that Antón Makarenco enunciated: Each person should be useful to the cause of the working class.

The Institute is named after the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, universally known in the field of popular education, based on which each student is the subject of a social project. The ethical, political, moral, and ideological values are the basis for the building of a new focus, based on the premise that only knowledge frees us. The Institute has the support of the Bolivarian University and of the Ministry of Higher Education of Venezuela and the methodological contribution of organizations which have developed a training method throughout many years: the MST, the ATC, the ANAP, etc., in general all the accumulated experience of the Latin-American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC), La Via Campesina, and the indigenous and afro-descendent organizations, who themselves have received support from the Josué de Castro Educational Institute of Brazil.

Finally, the Institute will be under the central coordination of CLOC, La Via Campesina, indigenous and afro-descendant representatives, with a circular structure of leadership and a curriculum design based on the competencies necessary to make of Agro-ecology new spaces for productive and social coexistence of the new actor who demands socialism in the 21st century.

Globalize the Struggle! Globalize Hope!
Latin American Institute of Agro-ecology "Paulo Freire" of Peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendent Studies

Nicaragua, July 2006