Route of the Imaginaries
What happens when people seeking a transition to regenerative ways of life receive a basic income for 24 months? Guadalupe Pilapaña, a fellow farmer and producer of sugarcane and its appetizing by-products, tells us about her experience. Through the basic income, Doña Lupita, together with her son Dylan, have been able to lease the farm of her parents, who are elderly, preventing it from being sold. They now ensure that their production is increasingly diverse and nutritious. The basic income has even allowed them to contemplate buying this land and has motivated Guadalupe to participate in local government to push for a gender and production agenda that revalues women.
Regarding Universal Basic Income: basic income is an amount of money given periodically and unconditionally to all residents of a community to guarantee their economic subsistence. In other words, the UBI is supposed to be universal, individual, and unconditional.
The Network of Seed Guardians (RGS) in Ecuador accepted the invitation of Misereor, a German agency for welfare cooperation and social, ecological and economic transition, to implement a basic income pilot project in the country. RGS identified 60 people who will receive a monthly income of US$250 for two years, with no conditions on the use of these resources.
A particularity in the approach of this project is that seed guardians have proposed partners from their local environments, who have shown interest in moving towards a regenerative transition, sustainability and the Common Good.
Guadalupe is waiting for us at the Santo Domingo farm in the community of Gualea, located in the Andean Chocó bio-region, northwest of Quito. She is part of a diverse group of six women who are exploring regenerative processes through education, handicrafts, baking, human rights and food production. Doña Lupita, for her part, has focused on increasing the production and diversity of her farm through a syntrophic garden and work with animals. However, Lupe has not limited herself to her personal project, but through her role in management and public representation has tried to break down prejudices so that women in agriculture are seen and valued.
Mainstreaming Gender
“There are many things that need to change and for women to change” explains Guadalupe, who also participated in the process, led by the Imaymana Foundation, to include gender equality as a central axis in the regeneration of the Andean Chocó territory. There she met Nina Duarte, a renowned researcher in agro-food systems, and currently her mentor in the framework of the basic income project. Lupita has always been interested in community processes and with the financial cushion of the basic income she was able to launch herself into local government, where she was elected to the Parish Council.
Although she has cultivated her expertise in agriculture, she has been entrusted with a variety of issues such as security or risk management; however, Lupita always seeks to reconnect with production initiatives and entrepreneurship, in the hope of improving living conditions. She has achieved openness through the gender approach. She is currently conducting a diagnosis of the needs of women in her parish Gualea. It would seem that the experiences and ways of life are very diverse. “What most marks the aspirations of rural women”, Guadalupe observes, “is their proximity or distance from the population center. There is also a general similarity: women’s work is not valued, and this is worse in the countryside “.
Tire-Flavored
From her father she learned agriculture, even when it was more conventional. Six years ago, Guadalupe started distilling sugar cane spirits, one of the main crops of the farm. “To distill and to know the tricks takes a lot of patience; I have tried a lot, also with mandarin liquor; and I have the idea of making a distillate with a violet color, maybe I will achieve this tone by adding lavender”.
Now, accompanied by her team from the Parish Council, she visits liquor producers and notices that most of them are women. “The explanation people give themselves”, Lupita tells us, “is that these are easy, soft tasks”, The technical skills and experience required to distill are not valued.“And it is not soft, because I have done it and it has been difficult for me. Sometimes I have stayed up until the wee hours of the morning calculating, making sure I get it right, that I don’t get that burnt taste, like a tire flavor, because you get a lot of things when you don’t know how to handle the temperatures”. It is a job that requires a lot of patience and precision to achieve the quality it deserves.
“Unlike industrial liquors”, Lupita emphasizes, “here we work with organic cane. If you go to the field, you will see that the spirits here are made from the ferment of the cane juice, instead of distilling its residues”. Guadalupe explains that, in general, production costs are not well calculated: “We don’t calculate the right cost: we don’t value the animal that carries the cane, we don’t value the cost of the firewood; so, we say, at one dollar, it’s fine, because we don’t value our work or the efforts we make at home”.
The Value Of Writing
One of the main challenges, where male chauvinism also plays a role, is that “we are not used to planning”. Traditionally, in the rural areas, ” who manages the money is the man, who makes it stretch is the woman”. Since there is no planning dialogue, then arranging the work, what is done, how and when it is done, is separated from the needs and potentials. “For this“, shares Lupita, “writing is fundamental: I think that writing and recording what we are doing is very useful, even to see how we were before, how we are now and how we want to be in the future”.
New Generations And Greater Equity
“As long as there are patriarchal structures, we will not overcome this situation”, Guadalupe explains. For her, it is essential that women, in their role as mothers, do not continue to inculcate this classic role behavior in their sons. In the case of her 25-year-old son Dylan, something different is happening. After having known life in the capital, Dylan has returned to his mother´s home and is gradually shaping his life project on the farm; the intergenerational is viable when there is respect and freedom, back and forth.
Collective Approach
During our visit, Lupita takes us to see her syntropic plot. “It is a project of 12 syntropic plots, in different parts of the territory, where we carry out a sort of caravan, visiting the farm of each participant, practicing collective work and supporting each other in the implementation of the plots”. These highly diverse crops are a clear example of the vision of planning the time it will take to grow the crops, including roots, creepers, medicinal plants, fruit trees and timber. Instead of furrows, they are wide beds with a high density and variety of plants planted, with different layers: malanga, turmeric, pineapple, turnip, bean, citrus and others. The surface is protected with a layer of mulch, dry stubble; at the edge are tree trunks that help as fertilizer as they are gradually digested by microorganisms.
The syntropic orchard not only offers new perspectives of regeneration, by proposing concrete tools for the design and planning of the orchard according to its use. It also breaks with the logic of deforestation and monoculture, unfortunately characteristic of the parish of Gualea, where one sees entire hectares of aloe vera alone. Guadalupe comments: “And after we remove the aloe vera, how will that land be left? We don’t see in the future what will happen to us, but in the moment. What we want to earn and not what I want to have, I’m not looking ahead to what I’m going to leave”.
Seeing Is Believing
Guadalupe prefers to show in practice that things work instead of explaining only in theory. Blanca and Ledy are two young women who work for the Parish Council in caring for the elderly. “I teach the girls in the syntropic plot how a vegetable garden works, giving them ideas on how they can work with interested people to start small vegetable gardens in the backyard of their homes”. Guadalupe regrets that in the area the custom of supporting each other in mingas (collective works) has been quite lost. “A lot of ancestral knowledge has been lost, for example, regarding soil fertility. There is the challenge of working collectively, particularly among women”. Against this backdrop, it is easier to understand the importance of the dialogues that have arisen among those participating in the basic income project; these dialogues are open to all interested people; these group spaces, generated from the subsidy or UBI, have given many people access to knowledge.
In June of this year (2024) the monthly payment of the basic rent ends. Guadalupe already has a clear outlook for the time ahead: “The income generated from honey, cane sugar, distillates and raising pigs will be enough to pay the rent and back up a loan to buy the farm, or at least part of it. I wouldn’t have imagined it at first”, Lupita confesses. “Maybe we used to think that since we have a house in the village and that little wooden house is mine, what we used to say was that we could set up a business there, with my son. But now, on the other hand, we are thinking more, we said, no, let’s see how we can negotiate, until the end of this year and we will see how we can stay in and with the farm”.
Messages to the Future
1
Basic income helps to take steps towards unexpected but desired futures. It allows us to give ourselves the opportunity to dream, to plan, and to walk towards the realization of dreams that may be born from the individual, but are nourished by and point towards the collective.
2
From the self, rooted in being a woman, in her cultural identity, her origin and ancestry, Guadeloupe allows us to accompany her authentic transition; dignifying herself as a person, revaluing women and their immense work in the field.
3
With the basic income, Guadeloupe is bringing her desired future to the present, living more and more her dreams and utopias, contributing to greater equity and equality. Her enthusiasm and joy are good ingredients to sustain this transition.
The text was elaborated, based on an on-site visit and conversations with Guadalupe Pilapaña in Gualea / Chocó Andino, by Michelle Ruiz, coordinator of the RGS RBU (Network of Seed Guardians – Universal Basic Income) pilot project and Jorge Krekeler, coordinator of the Almanac of the Future (Misereor facilitator on behalf of Agiamondo) in March 2024. Many thanks to Guadalupe for her time and openness to our visit. Thanks also to Michelle Ruiz for accepting the co-authorship and for her complicity in catching the paths of motivation.
Authors:
- Jorge Krekeler / jorge.krekeler@posteo.de
- Michelle Ruiz michellerzand@gmail.com
Design:
- Gabriela Avendaño.
- Ida Peñaranda
Contact information regarding the documented experience:
The text was elaborated, based on an on-site visit and conversations with Guadalupe Pilapaña in Gualea / Chocó Andino, by Michelle Ruiz, coordinator of the RGS RBU (Network of Seed Guardians – Universal Basic Income)
pilot project and Jorge Krekeler, coordinator of the Almanac of the Future (Misereor facilitator on behalf of Agiamondo) in March 2024. Many thanks to Guadalupe for her time and openness to our visit. Thanks also to Michelle Ruiz for accepting the co-authorship and for her complicity in catching the paths of motivation.
Red de Guardianes de Semillas – RGS
www.redsemillas.org
info@redsemillas.org
Translation: Olaf Niemtschik
Edition:
July 2024
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