Campesinas Helping to Create a Safe and Healthy Mother Earth

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas is working in partnership with our member organizations: La Mujer Obrera, Líderes Campesinas, Rural Coalition, MUjeres divinas, Mujeres Luchadoras progresistas, PCUN, Campesinos sin fronteras, and Farmworker Association of Florida in this collaborative project, known as ‘the mother earth project’ which launched in the spring of 2021

This project draws upon the ancestral knowledge and experience that exists within our communities. Collectively, we have the expertise to directly confront the challenges facing socially disadvantaged farmers, tribal and other land-based peoples. Our knowledge of how to cultivate the land to produce food, and how to be in right relationship with mother earth is the knowledge necessary to provide solutions to the climate crisis. We are living proof that humanity can transition away from an extractive relationship to the land to a mutually beneficial and  respectful relationship.

This transition requires more, not less, people engaged in agriculture. We have demonstrated over four decades how the most equitable, effective, and durable environmental policy solutions are emerging from the communities most directly and significantly impacted by the climate crisis. The campesinas represented by Alianza and our member organizations work backyard by backyard, acre by acre and community by community to protect land from toxins, defend land from incursion and to restore resilience as the basis of our culture, economy, ecology, society, and climate. Together we can build our infrastructure, setting in place a strong network dedicated to reclaiming our role in the food and agriculture system and restoring the resilience of the ecosystem to nourish and sustain our communities into the future.

The members of this project are:

Through this project, Alianza and our partners have started initiatives to gain access to unused lands in order to start community gardens in our towns and neighborhoods. As we continue to lobby for access to public lands, individual members of our organizations, who have backyard gardens share their crops, fruits and vegetables, herbs and plants amongst each other and also organize workshops about various plants and herbs and their medicinal properties. In addition to sharing what they grow, they have also organized with food donation centers to bring food to campesinas during the pandemic. These projects organized by campesinas and for campesinas are examples of the mutual aid projects that sustain us and have become our life line in these precarious times. Community gardens and shared backyard gardens have provided healing spaces to our members and their fellow campesinas. They also provide space free from employers, free from harvest quotas, free from abuse, harassment and exploitation for our members to reconnect and reflect on what it means to be in right relationship with mother earth.

While agricultural work in the fields is some of the lowest paid work in this country, it is also some of the most essential, for the obvious reason that food is essential to life. Those of us who do this work, day in and day out, have the life skills necessary to live off the land and we understand how to work in harmony with the land as opposed to having a hierarchical and extractive relationship with the land. Many of our demands for better and safer working conditions also lead to healthier agricultural practices that are less harmful to the land and environment. read more here.

Images featured are provided by member organizations of the Mother Earth Project.

We would like to thank our sponsors for their generous support of this project: Mosaic Momentum, the Solidaire Network, BEA Fund, and TIDES’ Frontline Justice Fund.