Erika Xananine Calvillo Ramírez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

I grew up listening to stories about the plants that grow in the tropical desert of Puebla, Mexico, home to a variety of indigenous communities – the nahuas, the mixtecas, the totonacas and the ngiwas – that I descend from. My grandfather says that when he was a child all that they ate were greens from the hills, seeds from the crops; that growing up he used to think that they were very poor for eating just that, since wealthy people in the city used to eat meat every day. But it is now that, strong and healthy at his 91 years of age, he has realized that what they ate was the best we could ever eat.

The experience of my grandfather, what he was influenced to believe, is not exclusive to our community or cultural region, it is shared across Mesoamerica and there are even records of chronicles where undervaluation narratives of indigenous food systems were being imposed during the colonization of Latin America. Even in the times of New Granada, present-day Colombia, indigenous peoples were told by the colonizers that the food they used to eat was non-nutritious, non-sustaining, worthless, inappropriate and even disgusting.[1]

This was part of the broader western intention to colonize not only our lands, but also our minds and our bodies. Food was one of the mechanisms used to force colonization, alongside religion and politics. This colonial intention, rooted in the ignorance of the nutrients, symbolism and knowledge behind the consumption of roots, weeds and insects, is however a historical testament of how food systems are vital for the recreation and transmission of a worldview, a system change and a cultural behaviour. Vandana Shiva has stated it already: those who control food, control life on earth.[2]

Scientists say now that the milpa is the base of Mesoamerican civilizations, not only as crop but as a way of life, because it is through food that we conceive the world, that we share knowledge, that we reproduce life. As our elders tell stories, pass on recipes, teach gathering and sowing traditions, we indigenous peoples are the guardians of this vital knowledge that relies on ecological diversity, complementarities, reciprocity and symbiosis between the plant species that compose these ancestral food systems.

From our oral tradition, from the stories of the elders, but also from archaeological science, we know that in Mesoamerica the plant-rich diet was the one that gave health to our communities and to our territories. Plant-centered diets have been at the core of indigenous Mesoamerican civilizations for over 10,600 years.[3] Since pre-ceramic times, traditions of health and nutrition were centered on seeds, weeds, roots and mushrooms as major components of the traditional diet.

More than 20 years ago, Pimentel acknowledged that food production systems would be more sustainable by reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products, and including more vegetable species in overall diets.[4] Our communities have known and lived a plant-centred diet, centuries ago. In the Mesoamerican regions, the main dishes were made out of gathered leaves, flowers, roots, mushrooms, weeds (that we call quelites, alaches), and even the edible cactus (nopales, tetechas, palmitos) that grow wild on the hills, but that have also been domesticated to be included in the traditional crops. These nutritious plants have been made into a variety of dishes, soups and drinks for generations. Together, the consumption of beans, vegetables, fruits, chili peppers and nixtamal (the nutritional enhancement process of corn to make tortillas) can constitute a complete, satisfactory diet, without animal proteins.

Mexico is home to the glorious and advanced pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world. Paradoxically, today it is displaying the highest mortality rates due to diabetes, due to the active promotion of the Western diet (based on meat and highly processed foods that require large agricultural areas, great quantities of pesticides, and produce large amounts of greenhouse gases).[5] The expansion of industrial animal agriculture is displacing our traditional food, stealing our freshwater and harming our ancestral relations to the territory that has sustained us for generations.

Historically, meat consumption was a marginal complement to the diet, never the core: it was reserved for times of ritual celebrations. It was only with western colonization that food systems were transformed to serve the Spanish commercial system and cultural tendencies.[6] Neglecting indigenous food traditions and identities, they sought to legitimize the civilized foods of the colonizer: meat and bread. Given the different and unknown soil conditions, it was only using large-scale livestock production that they were able to sustain their dominant way of life, where the fundament was to reproduce large-scale animal agriculture as a superior western food practice that allowed the domination and transformation of the “wild and unproductive” land that required to be transformed if it was to be civilized, at the expense of any beings that were previously inhabiting it.

After 1940, this conception of the necessity to transform economically non-productive land originated into a major land use change process led by the state, that converted natural areas to animal agriculture farms that now occupy 60% of the Mexican national territory,[7] being now one of the major drivers of land degradation, ecosystem deforestation, loss of biodiversity and water scarcity. Even today, the continuous support towards this exploitative and extractivist industry continues to be within the agendas of the international finance mechanisms. Only between 2018 and 2021, the Inter-American Development Bank Invest invested ~$500M in factory farming operations across Latin America and the Caribbean after investing just ~$15M in the sector between 2011 and 2017,[8] putting forward a system based on western diets that does not feed people but corporations.

Every cent spent on factory farming harms communities like mine. The finance that goes to factory farming is financing the climate crisis and the violation of indigenous peoples’ rights. Far from supporting global sustainability and development goals, the international financial structure, the multilateral development banks and private speculation is propping up a failing system and threatening to surpass the tipping points of the climate catastrophe.

Globally, animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate breakdown, already responsible for around 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions.[9] In Latin America, factory farming is the single largest driver of land conversion,[10] and that is being already experienced by our ngiwa land in the Tehuacán region, where the factory farming agribusiness is taking our ancestral land, an already fragile ecosystem, to create profit out of animal exploitation, indigenous rights violation, soil erosion, water stress and air pollution. Of the conflict cases in the region registered by the Environmental Justice Atlas, all are related to the factory farms and the poultry industry technologies to disseminate rainwater and dry up the groundwater.

Food systems transformation is an issue of indigenous peoples’ rights, because as communitary feminists remind us, land, body and territory are intersected, and the effects of an extractive industry are felt across all our battle fronts. This is not only in theory, it responds to a lived experience and to an ancestral teaching that is embedded in quotidianity, spirituality, and conflict. Our relation to our territorial land, to ourselves and our history is being transformed by the expansion of this agribusiness, oftentimes at either the cost of the conservation of the biocultural diversity of our region or the lives of our brothers and sisters that resist and defend the land.

According to 2022 Global Witness report,[11] Latin America is the most dangerous region in the world to be a human rights defender. It is not a coincidence that the industry directly linked with the most human right violations and lethal attacks towards environmental defenders is the agribusiness, more than a third of lethal attacks being towards indigenous peoples. Factory farming is now not only a threat to the environment but a danger to the people defending water, forests, and life itself. In my ngiwa community in Tehuacán, Puebla, our youth and elders being openly against the expansion of poultry industries and factory farming, we are at risk, and some have already been threatened and deprived of their freedom.

Since the very first introduction of livestock through colonization, to the neocolonial tendencies of Big Ag promoting western meat-based diets consumption for the sake of human and planetary health, indigenous peoples are resisting extractivist industrial agriculture and factory farming systems and their impacts on the loss of both plant biodiversity and oral traditions on ancestral diets.[12] But the ecosystems, knowledge and traditions that for thousands of years have sustained these alternative forms of nurturing nature and societies, are still alive, they are here within ourselves, and we are actively working to protect them.

This is one of the reasons why the climate action movement, people and institutions committed to sustainability, have a duty to decolonization, to redistribution, to reparations and reciprocity if we aim to transform the system that created the climate crisis in the first place. These emerging and rising voices of green transformation can kickstart a process where (primarily privileged) societies and rich nations ask themselves, given our socioeconomic conditions and ecological contexts, if it still makes sense to sow food and belief systems that have fundamentally severed the bond between humans and nature, that have historically exploited our labor and our land, by questioning the values and principles of an economic system whose absolute condition of existence (life itself) has to be necessarily put at risk (exploited or extracted) in order to create profit and reproduce itself.[13]

Any food transformation that follows has to put the conservation and reproduction of life at the center. These bio-centric solutions to transform our food systems, which have a fighting chance against the worst effects of the climate crisis, already exist and are in need to teach their true healing potential. In order to protect our land-body-territory, the ancestral knowledge that has sustained our culture, the self-determination and sense of community that sows our political vision, decolonisation of food systems transformation can be learned and resignified within the structures that feed societies all around the world. By making a shift within food systems, recognizing value in the ancestral plant-centered food traditions, and redirecting value chains and funding towards traditional methods and knowledge systems safeguarded by indigenous peoples, global ambition can increase global food sovereignty, strengthen sustainable livelihoods and preserve ecosystems.

To re-indigenously sow and gather our food, to lead a movement of liberation of communities and living beings, our values will be fundamentally rooted in climate justice, in committing to heal colonial wounds in our land-body-territory, acknowledging the power in civilizational alternatives to capitalism and continuously being able to imagine a future that is ancestral. By acknowledging the proposals of indigenous futurism, we can envision alternatives to the climate catastrophe, to the system that continuously endangers life, to the violence that comes from scarcity and ignorance; to dream (and therefore commit to sow) a future of ecological balance, of mutual help and solidarity that sustains and creates abundance and prosperity. Such a future exists, we are creating it, sowing it and feeding our bodies, minds and territories with it. The food systems and diets of the future that will allow us to address climate change are inherently ancestral, reclaiming ecological balance and reciprocal respect with our Mother Earth, that is not only possible but has already been a reality. We just need to remember, reclaim them back and share their seeds with the living beings that will come, with future and ancestral generations.

[1] Otte, Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, p. 294; FDHNRG, tomo VIII, p. 155; Vargas Machuca, Milicia y descripción de las Indias, p. 24 in Saldarriaga, Gregorio. Alimentación e identidades en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglos XVI y XVII: Segunda edición corregida y mejorada. Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2011.

[2] The seeds of Vandana Shiva, documentary https://vandanashivamovie.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/TSOVS-One-Sheet-Digital.pdf

[3] Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, Alondra Flores-Silva, and Patricia Colunga-García Marín. “The Archaic Diet in Mesoamerica: Incentive for Milpa Development and Species Domestication”. Economic Botany 66, no. 4 (2012): 328-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23325647

[4] David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 78, Issue 3, 2003, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916522033706

[5] Castillo AM, Alavez V, Castro-Porras L, Martínez Y and Cerritos R (2020) Analysis of the Current Agricultural Production System, Environmental, and Health Indicators: Necessary the Rediscovering of the Pre-hispanic Mesoamerican Diet? Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 4:5. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2020.00005.

[6] Saldarriaga, Gregorio. Alimentación e identidades en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglos XVI y XVII: Segunda edición corregida y mejorada. Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2011.

[7] INECOL, La ganadería y la pérdida de la biodiversidad, https://www.inecol.mx/inecol/index.php/es/ct-menu-item-25/ct-menu-item-27/17-ciencia-hoy/845-la-ganaderia-y-la-perdida-de-la-biodiversidad

[8] Stop Financing Factory Farming Coalition, CLIMATE MISALIGNMENT: How Development Bank Investments in Industrial Livestock Are at Odds With Their Paris Agreement Commitments https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SFFF_ClimateMisalignment_final.pdf

[9] UNEP, Food system impacts on biodiversity loss, https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/food-system-impacts-biodiversity-loss

[10] Ritchie, H. (2021). Cutting down forests: what are the drivers of deforestation? Our World in Data (OWID). https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation; Skidmore, M., et al. (2021). Cattle ranchers and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Production, location, and policies. Global Environmental Change. V. 68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102280 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021000595

[11] Global Witness, Standing Firm. The land and environmental defenders on the frontlines of the climate crisis, https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/standing-firm/

[12] Plant Based Treaty, Safe & Just Report, https://plantbasedtreaty.org/vegandonuteconomics/

[13] Enrique Dussel, Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión, Trotta, Madrid, 1998, p. 64