Jairo Restrepo is a leading champion of organic farming in Brazil, writes JuanFran Lopez, and now his influence has spread across the world. His mission too has expanded to include campaigning for the rights of small scale farmers, and an even wider project of economic, technological and societal transformation to put people at the centre of political power.

A passionate educator and activist in sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty, Jairo Restrepo campaigns for a return of self determination, knowledge and autonomy to the farmer away from the power of agribusiness.

His background is in Latin America including Cuba, where his philosophy has been hugely influential in helping to build that country’s agroecological movement:

“When we started promoting the proposal of organic agriculture in Cuba, in 10 years we were linked with 87,500 promoters of organic agriculture”, he told me.

“From 1997 up to 2007 where a 10 year programme was concluded and an assessment was performed in Havana, we recognised that this movement grew due to the interest of many farmers, so we did have a huge impact.

“I participated in the founding of the movement in Cuba and made several consecutive volunteer trips from place to place throughout the country. One of my trips lasted 78 days, and we were in contact with 3,000 Cuban technicians – this practically became policy.

“Ideas are shared through farmer to farmer learning. But organic agriculture is not a small farmer unit. It is not even a broader political proposal; it is broader than that. Organic agriculture goes from being an instrument of technological transformation to an instrument for transforming society.”

Society’s enslavement by technology and capital must end

And that idea of organic farming as a means of societal change driven by clean, green, ‘open-source’ technologies is key to his mission, which is ultimately one of human liberation: “Society does not have to be detached from technology. Technology is an expression of society and this is what we want.

“We don’t want to change technology; we want to transform society, thereby changing the technological proposal. Today the opposite occurs, the dominant type of technology proposes a society subjugated to industry, and we want the opposite.

And here I use one sentence quite a lot … ‘my dream is to construct a being, an ideal state of a being, so that I shall not be the ideal being of the State.’ I want to fight for this ideal state of being so that I won’t be the ideal of the State; that is not to be slavish.”

Economic transformation too is another part of the equation, he explains: “Industrial agriculture is no longer able to respond to the crisis of societal change. On the contrary it is causing the crisis, because agriculture and the food system wants to enslave society, concentrating economic revenues.

“This hungry proposal of accumulating capital by all means causes a crisis, and farmers see that this is not a technological issue but an economic crisis that in turn is a political crisis. Capital is its own gravedigger in this respect.”