From the conuco | EVERY FARM AN OPEN CLASSROOM | By: Toribio Azuaje

By: Toribio Azuaje

How happy the peasants would be if they knew that they were happy!

Virgilio

When I wrote the first letters of that proposal for the Argimiro Gabaldón Peasant University, I did so with the conviction of the need to transform the rural educational model to promote our agriculture and the peasant world that survives there. Today more than ever I believe that agricultural activity, cultivating the land, producing food, living in nature, can be transformed into a space for the good, for the creative, to dynamize the economy, to achieve a life in harmony with nature and above all it can become an activity in which one lives with one’s basic needs satisfied.

Each farm is an open classroom, that is how the proposal was conceived. The philosophical basis was to convert each piece of land, farm, conuco – whatever you want to call it – into a center for learning, based on local ancestral knowledge, academic sciences and new production technologies, achieving a mixture capable of provoking an orderly productive growth, in addition to achieving spiritual growth by harmonizing our activity as farmers in our relationship with nature. This proposal for popular education was conceived under the concept of liberating education.

It is true that our farms can become, in practice, a learning center, a school of agroecological training, a space for the exchange of knowledge that leads us to diversify productive activity. Likewise, to the extent that we develop organizational and production levels, then, these productive units can open space for the development of a rural tourism plan, or agrotourism. Many are those who would like to visit a rural space equipped to show rural agricultural, coffee, cocoa, horticultural work, whatever the agricultural orientation of that space. If we undertake a permanent plan for agricultural and tourist awareness and training in our rural communities, in small spaces, considering the local, the cultural, what we have, what we produce, what we can produce, we will substantially change rural life, converting agricultural activity into a space to generate significant levels of happiness and pleasure of life in harmony with nature. This supposes the adaptation of basic services of roads, electricity, education, health, among others.

The investment must be in the farms of our farmers, with them we can build a network of conucos or farms for collective learning, to generate levels of solidarity and mutual aid among the farmers of a sector or hamlet.

There are local organizational experiences in some regions of the country that deserve to be reviewed; these advances can give us insight into the creation of local organizational development plans for production. I would like to point out one of them, the La Mocuy Agroecological Peasant School, in the state of Mérida, which has been developing a nice job of training and educating peasants, with a clear agroecological tendency. This experience is worth observing in order to learn from it.

If we promote similar local organizations, surely with other organizational modalities according to the realities and cultural capacities of the area, we might well begin to provoke the necessary changes that can occur from the local level. The power of change and growth is within us, we just need to awaken it and guide it. For its part, coffee growing is a productive current that lends itself to this organizational growth of agroecological production and rural tourism or agrotourism.

…And speaking of the Universidad Campesina, that proposal was approved by President Chávez, others were in charge of shaping it and promoting it, at this point I know nothing regarding its health, I don’t know if it is functioning, if it was swallowed up by the state bureaucracy that distorts everything, or if it became just another one of the bunch.

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