MOSES Conference a Goldmine for Latino/Hispanic Farmers

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 4, 2009

Although Latino/Hispanic communities and entrepreneurs are still behind in understanding the value of organic agriculture from a health standpoint, at least we can start understanding it from the economic opportunities that this industry represents as told from the top.

Some of us have been on the organic sustainable agriculture wagon since before we immigrated to the United States, but so many still consume products that not only come from places where other Latino/Hispanics labor the fields exposed to highly toxic chemicals and un-humane laboring conditions. As consumers or laborers, we don’t only lose as part of the synthetic chemical dominated agriculture industry.

I just came back from an annual conference of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services in La Crosse WI. The keynote speaker Vandana Shiva, is one of the most outspoken world leaders and pain causing thorns on the side of global chemical agriculture polluters and grain monopolies.

She provided a full review of what it takes to produce food in a healthy way, for the soil so that it can sustain production for centuries on its own energy and bio-systems, for the farmer so that he/she does not get poisoned with their family as they farm, and for eaters, so that they have an option to choose responsibly produced foods and exercise their role to complete a biological cycle that is as old as earth itself.

Deep inside, I think we could all agree that since our beginnings our evolution process designed us to depend on a symbiotic and highly complex infrastructure of interactions with the earth, our environment and every living thing around, even those that kill us have a purpose in our evolution.

This original design has advanced for billions of years and its yields in terms of making the earth productive and our bodies healthy, will never be matched by playing around at the end of the R&D chain that nature set forth well before there were scientists and corporations who paid them to find ways to interrupt such process by killing the soil’s trillions of organisms, and millions of species that make up our earth’s diversity.

Having met thousands of people who are no longer part of the destructive forces of our industrialization processes is so refreshing and hopeful, despite the fact that our biological systems are been destroyed much faster than we can rebuild them. I see a lot more understanding that preserving nature’s rich diversity and complexity is part of our own preservation and opportunity to continue to evolve and adapt to changing conditions on earth.

It was great to meet with farmers and responsible companies and re-connect with so many people in the hundreds, some of them with good quality tracks of land, some of which we have started negotiating as we are always looking for resources that can help us introduce new Latino families into sustainable, organic agriculture.