Underground subsistence: Feeding beings in the Andes of Ecuador
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. Pedro Soler presents here the community which will host the next soil assembly in May 2025.
It’s 10 in the morning, in an open field, and we are standing around a woman seated in front of an altar spread out on a cloth. The altar is colorful, full of sweets and fruits and stones. A hole has been dug in the ground just beside it. Violeta is asking for permission, talking to the land, singing as she shakes a rattle. She tells us that the land likes sweet things. One after the other, everyone takes something from the altar and throws it into the hole, thanking and feeding the land. Some women cross themselves as they throw in their orange. And then the hole is filled in with earth.
We are in the time of Pawkar Raymi, the March Equinox, in a workshop organized by La Divina Papaya on their farm in Kayambi territory. It is the time of tender grains: corn on the cob and frijoles, lentils and peas, chochos and broad beans and the soup called fanesca made with this harvest and more, 12 ingredients in total, from the Andean chakra or garden. Time for everyone in the community to eat abundantly. Traditionally, nobody is turned away, just as in the chakra no plant is sown alone, plants are also families and communities, they become sad if isolated. The recipe for fanesca is resistance and a guide, instructions of what and when to plant, memory and future of diversity, abundance and collectivity.
Not all the compañeras have come today because they’ve been busy selling their grains for people to make fanesca, but quite a few did. Now we are going to make a different kind of fanesca. That’s what Julio, a member of the Ekorural foundation and agricultural investigator, says as he introduces the workshop: “This is a fanesca for the soil.” He starts by asking everyone to participate in organizing the numerous seeds we have brought on a grid laid out on the ground with growth rate on the x axis and required sunlight (which is often the height but not always) on the y axis. Plants feed the life of the soil with their exudates on which fungi and bacteria thrive, feeding in their turn all the other vertiginous cycles of the soil. Then we prepare food for all: rock powder for bacteria, leaf mold from the woodland floor, different composts, pea flour for the fungi, some sand. Everybody participates in throwing everything together, adding the seeds and then mixing it all together.
Knowledge and practice of Uku-Pacha
Most of these indigenous peasants are women now in their fifties, who have spent their whole lives practicing subsistence agriculture in their chakras. Others are younger peasants who stayed home (or, more rarely, got an education and came back), along with educated post-urban people. Their meeting provides a space for transferring knowledge, building food sovereignty and hopefully surviving through these coming decades of collapse. While the most august scientific bodies have been calling for the agro-ecological transformation of agriculture for quite some time now, in reality those who practice these arts, who have been practicing them for millennia, constitute the poorest and most abandoned sector of society. We live in an upside-down world.
In Andean cosmovision, the word Pacha refers to both time and space – so the three pachas that make up the cosmos, above, in-between and below, are real places that accumulate time in layers or spirals. The pacha of the soil, as well as the inside of the body, is Uku Pacha. Uku means inside. Great care should be taken in relation to this realm, residence of the huge serpent Amaru, of the dead and the yet unborn. All underground water is included there too, springs, the bottom of the sea, our internal organs. Each of us is a little world too, and there is no hell below us. The complex interplay of time and space that makes bodies and worlds is always tending toward balance and complementarity. When things get way out of balance, then there is a drastic correction or reversal, an upheaval and change of cycle, called Pachakutik.
Looking South and West from the field, on the horizon are massive greenhouses, filled with roses, generators, pumps, machines grinding up rose stalks for compost, ultra-low frequencies. The rural world is a battleground now. Agribusiness snaps up the land of migrants, peasants tired of being poor or disconnected heirs, and transforms them into highly technified, productive greenhouses. It is an industry that generates a lot of money, the fifth-most important export of Ecuador, but screams fragility, completely dependent on fossil-fueled airplanes to deliver a non-essential good to the North, at a huge environmental cost. The combination of economics and emissions means that it has no viable future, yet it all just gets faster, bigger, wider. Now the majority of young people here work in the flower greenhouses. They don’t cultivate anymore and eat processed food from the corner shops. A wage instead of a garden, and then there are no more gardens.
The good life: getting together with others
When Maria Mies studied subsistence farming among women in Bangladesh in the 1980s, she found that it was the key to autonomy and a good life. The “subsistence perspective” that she developed from these and other investigations is in explicit resistance to global patriarchal capitalism and its devastating impacts. It is life production instead of commodity production. In the Andes this is called Sumak Kawsay, good living: “Subsistence is not shortcoming and misery, as we are constantly made to believe. If it is understood correctly that is, and not as individual subsistence – which is not possible – then you always have to get together with others to do something, not only to survive, but to live well. Then it is actually possible to create the good life. You experience that you are your own authority, that together with others, you’re sovereign.” [1]
Now Julio has stopped explaining and everyone is working. The compañeras are planting trees and roses, filling in with the magic mix, soil food, soul food. They work fast, economy and power of their movements as they open holes for the plants, confident bodies in the frontier between worlds. The young men and women are there amongst them, one is operating the wheelbarrow, another is measuring the distances between the roses, others are planting. As the direct heirs of the peasant line get older, there are fewer and fewer young people to take up the mantle, and migration is having a huge impact on the rural areas.
But all this could change in a second, or at least in a few weeks, without diesel. During the pandemic, many young people returned to work alongside their parents or grandparents. The national strike of 2021 lasted 18 days, all the roads were closed, and local food production suddenly became of critical importance. All the prices went up, and then things went back to normal. But soon, there will be no going back to normal. The Pachakutik is here and a small farm or peasant future is now – as Chris Smaje [2] points out, “our best shot for creating future societies that are tolerably sustainable in ecological terms and fulfilling in nutritional and psychosocial ones.”
Inevitably, as temperatures and sea levels rise in the tropical areas, everyone will be flocking to the mountains where there is still water and agriculture. They’ll come from other parts of the Andes too, when the glaciers finally disappear. If an agro-ecological peasant transition were in progress, needing lots of hands, lots of organisms and with fair access to land, there would be work for them when they arrive: gardening, guiding water, building soil, tending to life. Subsistence work, collective work, with plenty of time for art.
But for this to happen there needs to be some sort of collapse or revolution, a deep cultural and existential change. Young people already migrate here in search of subsistence work under the vigilant gaze of armed guards in the greenhouses that cover the valley. Maybe starving refugees will soon work the greenhouses in return for only bad food and a dormitory bunk. Like the estates of the bad old days, but with cameras, machines and chemicals, or the fortified farms in the movie “Soylent Green”.
Maize demands little work compared to the bounty of its harvests [3]. Potatoes wait beneath the surface until you need them, invisible to the conqueror’s eyes. A diverse plant diet with a bit of guinea pig from time to time and chicken and chicha for a party. It’s been done before, a good life of infinite imagination within the limits of subsistence, just as the poet Tao Yuanming wrote 1600 years ago in China:
“At a single glance I survey the whole Universe.
What pleasures can compare with these?”
From 8-10 of May 2025, a Soil Assembly (Tinku Uku Pacha) will be held in the community of La Chimba, near Cayambe in Ecuador, bringing together peasant farmers, soil scientists and artists. It will also publish the Spanish language version of The Laboratory Planet, on initiatives and practises for soil health and regeneration in Latin America. Enquiries and participation: lab at makery.info
Find out more about the Soil Assembly program in Ecuador.
The Laboratory Planet and the Soil Assembly network will also be presented at a dedicated day at Antre Peaux in Bourges on November 23, 2024.
Notes
(1) Transcription of a video interview of Maria Mies by O. Ressler, recorded in Cologne, Germany, (2005). https://transversal.at/transversal/0805/mies/en
(2) Chris Smaje – “A Small Farm Future – Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth”. Chelsea Green Publishing (2020)
(3) 30 person-days per hectare per year to sow and tend and 10 person-days per hectare per year to harvest about 1200 kg., sufficient to feed a family of 4 people for 1 year. Gregory Knapp – “Andean Ecology – Adaptive Dynamics in Ecuador”. Routledge (1991)