Finding a Shared Language

A conversation with Verónica Villa from the ETC Group

Working in food sovereignty is no easy fate. We seek plurality over uniformity. We desire a diverse, collaborative, and bountiful world — like the fields tended by our ancestors, and by peasants and campesinos/campesinas today. We long for a world where agriculture is not a business but a collaborative network that prioritises people over profit. Where communities the world over can shape their own food systems, resulting in a shared tapestry of humanity. 

For many, this vision seems unattainable. But for others, working towards food sovereignty means doing what is right despite the weight of our current realities, and remaining firm in the belief it is the only way to move forward is to chip away at the unjust corporate consolidation that plagues our food systems today.

In a world with so much noise, Veronica Villa is someone who listens deeply and cultivates beautiful connections with those whose paths cross hers. She represents a safe space. Steadfast. Kind. Reflective. 

Vero’s work in language and translation, combined with her background in anthropology, allows her to find common threads among stories and contexts that shed light on the richness of cultural pluralities. She navigates the world in search of a shared language, one that is rooted in unity and care. Her work in making the many struggles, realities and nuances of food systems not only accessible, but also relatable, spills outside of the borders of academic realms, and creates a deeper sense of belonging. She commits to seeing what often goes unnoticed, and amplifying what others would rather leave unheard.

Having learned from Vero in shared projects, and as a dear friend, we thought of sharing with you a conversation on culture, language, and maize. We hope you learn from her as much as we have.

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When did you first learn about the idea of food sovereignty? 

For many decades, food security was centred on the Mexican government’s agenda – things like how much food we imported and how much food we produced. Much of what I learned and understood as an anthropologist about the defence of land and life with Indigenous communities, already included much of what food sovereignty is.

When we talk about hunger, a food security approach thinks about handing out bags of soy flour to people in need, or children in schools. It’s a calorie intake perspective, and that’s it — “problem solved”. When I joined ETC Group, I understood how food is related not only to our health and nutrition, but also to the dignity of our communities, and to our history and culture. This is fundamental to unpack the nuances of food systems, and the connections to corporate agendas, and technology. 

Can you tell us more about the intersection between technology and food systems?

At ETC, we come from a history of denouncing the first genetically modified seeds, exposing the complicity between different industrial sectors to advance in the field. A classic example is how seed companies associate with chemical companies and create crops and seeds dependent on the chemical inputs they sell. This clearly shows how scientific and technological "development" is focused on creating a commodity, a captive consumer, and a dependency on a product.

Another good example is how industrial development is often equated with welfare. Many picture development as infrastructure, communications, electrical appliances, computers, and an abundance of industrial and commercial goods.

But of course, the planet has limits, so instead of addressing the flaws of technoscience or corporate science, however we want to call it, corporations only see how they can intervene with the planet to continue the same pattern of resource extraction, mass production, and pollution, so as not to sacrifice this imposed idea of what it is to be “developed”.

What do communities in the Amazon who are fighting against oil spills share in common with native seed defenders in Mexico? 

They’re all facing the intervention of industrial, corporate technologies that consider neither human or environmental rights, nor the cycles of life.

ETC Group has a history with native maize (corn) defence. How did it all start?

One of the first things that ETC Group started to do in Mexico was to get involved in the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a biotechnology new at the time, running unchecked, potentially contaminating native maize varieties. Global discussions had taken place about how native crops had to be protected in their centres of origin, and formal safeguards had to be in place so that the genetic integrity of staple crops could be maintained. 

In the context of the [North American] Free Trade Agreement, around 1995, a massive amount of maize arrived in Mexico from the United States, and everybody knew that the production of transgenic maize was not segregated from conventional corn. People like Silvia Ribeiro, ETC Group’s Director for Latin America, and other local advocates were warning about the imminent contamination of Mexico's native maize. But almost nobody paid attention to this alarming issue until a Mexican scientist from Oaxaca proved the transgenic contamination of native maize in his laboratory. It was a worldwide scandal because it exposed the crops' vulnerability and confirmed that transgenics were being used irresponsibly.

We hear a lot about Mexico’s ban on GM maize, but from your work at ETC, what can you share about this issue that is usually not told in the media?

Here is the thing: there is no radical ban on GM maize, and the United States is responding to the soft ban as if it were something massive. It only seeks to prohibit the entry of transgenic maize into the dough and tortilla sector — that is to say, goods that Mexicans directly consume. 

But maize has many industrial uses because it is an incredibly versatile crop, and the food, pharmaceutical, livestock, and energy industries covet it. Industrial use of maize extends to things like sweeteners, animal feed, and processed fried foods that flood the supermarkets. As this ban refers only to the maize that reaches tortilla factories, it doesn’t really challenge the avalanche of industrially produced maize-based goods that are produced in Mexico with corn from the United States entering through the free trade agreement. Such a small ban is not enough to take care of the local economies. If the Mexican government truly wants to reclaim the country’s maize sovereignty, it would have to get out of the free trade agreement or at least review its entire approach to agriculture. But these processes are so big that it seems like a way out, on a policy level, is so far away. 

Maize speaks the language of its peoples. For them, it represents the possibility of autonomy. Those that still maintain systems of agricultural independence and own their land have a lot of political freedom. So maize is defended not only as the basis of sustenance but also because communities who are organised around the planting of maize can defend themselves from political abuse, they can isolate themselves from policies that harm them, they can even defend their territories against organised crime. 

There have been incredible community-led movements and strategies throughout history; from not allowing biologists, agronomists, or anthropologists to enter their territories to do bioprospection, because biopiracy was the first reason for the communities in Mexico to close up to outsiders, to rejecting the seeds from the government's technological packages, or from the supply stores that the state puts in rural areas. 

The philosophy of only accepting seeds if you know the history of that seed is also crucial. In Mexico, the people say that each seed has a history, has a family with a great responsibility to take care of it. It’s like when you go to your daughter's or son's wedding. You want to see the family in which they will grow, how they will feel and flourish. The same goes for seeds. Such community-led tactics, en masse, are very powerful.  

What can other rural communities around the world learn from Mexico to overcome the many challenges they currently face?

With ETC Group, we shared our lessons from what we were doing in Mexico to protect maize with countries in Asia defending native rice. To start, it was important that communities understood what the threats of GMOs are, because it seemed very abstract at that time. So we would bring a microscope to community meetings so that people could get a sense of how the very being of seeds was modified. It was to explain the concept of “cell”, by actually seeing them.

When contamination was suspected, we took samples of leaves and seeds or fruits and made tests in the laboratory. It was also necessary to call for international solidarity to fund these expensive experiments, and to have test kits available. The challenge was that, after a few years, the communities realised that they could not always argue in physiological terms, because it was a very technical language that not everyone understood, and on top of that, the defence of native maize could not depend on scientific expertise or external funds. Those are two big lessons.

However, it is very important to highlight the role of scientists and academics who really try to engage in a horizontal dialogue with Indigenous communities. Many have been capable of seeing their work through a critical, ethical and moral lens, which ultimately led them to confirm, with their own microscopes, that biotechnologies can also be a science of death.

When we build honest dialogues, enriched by our contexts and cultures, the exchange of knowledge becomes a source of great power. I believe that horizontal learning practices, which are at the essence of Latin America’s peasant resistance, can help navigate the challenges any community faces from a humanised perspective, rooted in listening and respect.

What do you think is the role of culture in the evolution of the food sovereignty movement?

When the free trade agreement was consolidated in 1994, it was also the time of the rise of the Indigenous army, the Zapatista uprising in the country’s south. 

Their efforts changed the terms of participation of Indigenous peoples in the state, and so it was really an awakening for all Mexicans, and a reminder for many other sectors in Latin America, about the power of Indigenous representation and the importance of their nations. The cultural explosion that the Zapatista’s first declaration led to was brilliant. They had 10 inalienable demands: land, work, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace.

These demands follow a logical order. First, you secure your material life, and at the end, you secure your freedom, your sovereignty, and peace. It was a beautiful process that took many years, and since then, I believe that no one can forget the importance of the struggle for land and the struggle for life on the communities' own terms. Meaning, the cultures of the mountains have different ways of life from the cultures of the valley, the river, or the jungle.

Now, there are many urban identities that are gradually remembering that their origins come from the countryside, or that, for example, there are millenary remedies that work and aid in these times of anxiety. Alternative therapies, micro-dosing, herbalism — there is a present yearning to understand what our mothers, our grandmothers, and our elders used to do and to pass on that cultural legacy to new generations. So culture is always dynamic, it’s not a fixed, museum object, it morphs and flows each passing second.

You see, maize peoples do a lot of rituals, but many understand rituals as, for example, a dance that is done to summon rain. Like a magic formula that leads to a result. But recently, I learned from an Indigenous writer that rituals are not simple magic. Their essence is to be a reminder of what a community did at a certain moment to get through a problem, in hopes that something different, a resolution, would happen. So, if we see rituals as marks on a community’s path towards transformation, we can also see culture’s great nature of change.

People from all around the world came to the indigenous communities to learn from the Zapatistas. What did that look like?

40 years ago in Chiapas colonisation was very present, with the “applied anthropology” discourse where the Mexican state tried to erase Indianness, erase indigeneity, erase roots. The Zapatistas, as part of their rebellion, were very aware that they had to imbue a new spirit in those who came after them, behind the generation that embodied their fight and sought weapons, all those who came after them and their heirs in the struggle would have to have another vision of themselves as a people, as a nation, as communities. So, together with other movements, indigenous leaders and critical thinkers they organised creative, avant-garde, decolonial education plans - when the term “decolonial” wasn’t even popular.

So under the principle of "we are not going to ask for education from the state, we are not going to ask for aid, we are not going to ask for health, we are not going to ask for infrastructure from the state", a lot of people who believed self-determination was possible got involved, and it was beautiful. So imagine building agreements among peoples that spoke three or four different Indigenous languages, for the state of Chiapas has 12 different, mostly Mayan languages, which are also shared with Central America.

As happens in many other indigenous regions in Mexico, communities in the Zapatista areas sent to their education projects their children and young people as representatives, so imagine being 11, 14, or 19 years old, and carrying the responsibility to know and pass along what the community wanted to learn, and what was going to help them in their lives. 

It was part of a boom of indigenous education projects sharing those values. The learning plans were discussed with community representatives to adapt mathematics, science, and history to what they needed.  So lessons were adapted to their context. The examples had to do with their environment, their crops, their animals, their problems when facing the outside world, the mestizo (mixed-race) world.

The autonomous regions, as they were soon called and known, reorganized health, livelihoods and education focused on their future. So the processes, especially the formation of the little ones, didn’t rely on an abstract future where you expect to be qualified by the accumulation of grades, but each day in itself was a day where something blossomed in your intellect, in your understanding of the world, and it was expressed in a sentence, a song, an infographic, a play, a speech, a poem. It was incredible. Your day ends, or your week ends, and you feel an inner change, an intellectual openness, and you feel more like a subject than an object of history, or of circumstances.

How did your experience with indigenous communities shape the way you approach translation work?

When I translate, I know that I'm not doing technical work, but that I really want the reader to understand, and sometimes that means changing the examples to things that are culturally significant, and you can always put the original idea in parentheses or in a footnote. But there are some incredibly bad translations where you open a book, and you don't understand anything in your own language. So adaptation to local or cultural contexts is very important. I also refine tones and sayings, because I find that oftentimes they carry an arrogance of the empire, of the coloniser.  Even if they are written by great organisations with humanitarian backgrounds, some things still read in an unsettling way.

I am now reviewing the Spanish version of a  study on industrial seaweed farming, an issue that should make us all feel outraged. So if we want to unite and strengthen our actions, then we have to take away the arrogance of technical discourse. Just imagine that Indigenous peoples are going to read this, even if the texts are “correctly” translated, they are not going to say anything to them. 

When I translate, I don't assume that everything will be understood, and this is a matter of commitment. We are in a climate emergency, and we really want millions of fisherfolk in Asia to understand the problem of industrial seaweed farming. We have to get out of the technical boundaries and find culturally relevant narratives.

We know music and dance hold a very special place in your heart. How did your love for Mexican folk art spark?

I grew up listening to Mexican Sones, and one day I realised that the word 'son' referred to popular peasant music, and I understood that there were like a hundred different types of sones that tell you the reality of a territory. So I began to associate these songs with the wonder of seeing those other realities in my memories — of having gone to that town, having lived something special, or having tasted a new food. In the end, each son opens up that world that you keep in your hard drive, and you identify the connection of what is sung on the coast, in the mountains, what the migrants from those areas sing, how they arrive in the city and adapt the music and the languages.

My father was from the state of Guerrero, and there is an area there called Tierra Caliente with sones where you hear the European teachings of the violin, but adapted to the countryside and Indigenous communities, where they even make the horses dance. And there are also fishing villages, so they have a percussion structure of Black rhythms, it's a mixture that puts you in a very nice trance. And I like the sounds of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which is the waist of Mexico, where Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca live. The songs are full of nostalgia, it's an area with a lot of wind and sea, so to me, they sound like a very old sadness, a bit like fado.

You’ve mentioned how things like free trade agreements or corporate consolidation seem like behemoths that are just too big to overthrow. And their power can make us feel hopeless, like change is way out of reach. But what gives you hope and fuels your day-to-day to continue to do this work at ETC Group?

Lately, we have been analysing how events of the recent past in the food sovereignty movement can teach us to be prepared for future crises. We’ve had very open reflections, and it is crucial we hold the space for these types of conversations. For example, someone shared that when she saw what was happening in North Carolina’s industrial pig farms, 10 years ago, she was able to understand and talk about what disasters would come to Mexico the moment those companies arrived in Veracruz state, which is incredibly helpful. 

Another thing for me is that we often hear  “there are no leaders, leadership is nowhere”, or that the era of massive movements is over. But we cannot forget that peoples are in constant movement. I see it as a rhizome, something unstoppable, an expansion that can sometimes go underground. And so we must pay attention to the infinite number of processes in which people, after all these decades of aggression by neoliberal capitalism, are reclaiming their food sovereignty, engaging in dialogues and exchange of knowledge. Mirroring struggles across diverse regions of the earth are coming together ever more often to unite and claim their possibilities for a just future. That gives me hope.

1. This article by Alexander Zaitchik for The Nation, unpacks the dangerous control the Gates Foundation and agribusiness giants hold over African food systems. As trades and agreements are made between organisations and governments, small-scale farmers are often left out of the debate to supplant traditions and practices that have endured for millennia.

2. This article by Keith Anthony S. Fabro for Mongabay, highlights the long-standing debate over Golden Rice. Its introduction in Asia, a region heavily reliant on rice as a staple food, is endangering its diverse indigenous rice varieties.

3. This article by Jeon Park for the LA Times covers how Sikhs in Fresno and across California have joined residents of Oaxacan descent in working to outlaw caste-based discrimination, which both have been subject to.

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