From Mexico to Palestine: caring for the land as a form of resistance by indigenous communities against capital

Insight by Sara Manisera, FADA Collective.

“We realized we were losing millennia-old knowledge. We decided to establish a community seed house to preserve the indigenous corn seeds of our region, return them to the hands of the communities, and decide what to eat." These are the words of Daniel Vázquez, coordinator and founder of the rural collective Atocpan. We meet him in San Pedro Atocpan, in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, thanks to an exchange project supported by the Bertha Foundation, with photojournalist Greta Rico and activists Ana Larranaga and Lindsey Loberg.

Alongside Daniel, other farmers from various areas of the state have gathered to meet with us. None of them use chemical products for cultivation, and they are all aware of what lies behind the so-called "technology package" made up of seeds, pesticides, and herbicides provided by agro-pharmaceutical multinationals. In recent decades, Mexico—like other countries—has been subjected to considerable pressure from large multinationals: from the grabbing of indigenous lands to the imposition of hybrid and GMO seeds, to the pressures from Bayer AG, owner of Monsanto, to make Mexico abandon its ban on glyphosate, a carcinogenic pesticide that is the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicides used in agriculture.

For thousands of years, farmers in different parts of the world have preserved invaluable biological treasures for their communities and the environment: indigenous seeds. These seeds have nourished and built the great civilizations in Central America, Mesopotamia—the land between the two rivers—and the Levant, and reached the great civilizations of Asia. Today, these seeds, in every corner of the planet, are under great pressure due to increasing urbanization, the abandonment of rural areas, but above all, due to a constant and systematic action of land grabbing, fencing, and the occupation of indigenous lands by companies, multinationals, and states. Over the centuries, they have appropriated the "free goods" of nature—such as water, soil, mountains, and forests—to be used for capital.

Among these goods are also seeds, increasingly controlled by a handful of multinationals that hold patents, capital, and technology. Controlling seeds essentially means controlling the food system, food itself, and culture, making farmers and citizens dependent on purchasing and consuming certain products. Most of the seeds available today not only cannot be reproduced year after year but are also closely linked to the use of pesticides. However, losing seeds does not just mean losing food independence, but also losing culture. "The idea of the community seed house was born from this. When we started collecting seeds, we were amazed by the number of stories people shared about their seeds and memories. We were fascinated to hear how seeds had passed from hand to hand, from generation to generation. In fact, seeds are people, and people are seeds. They are not external pieces. The seed is history, culture, tradition, and future. Everything we do is therefore an act of resistance," explains Vázquez.

Like Daniel, the other members of the collective, sitting around a table filled with tortillas, mole, and other dishes of Mexican cuisine, are equally convinced. Farming today is an act of love and resistance. Laura Flores, a lawyer and daughter of farmers, knows this well, having returned to work the land. "Multinationals take away freedom and independence from us farmers. But also from all citizens. We eat three times a day, but we no longer know what we are eating or who produces it. Tastes and flavors are the same in Mexico as they are in Italy. They have sold us the idea that modernity is about abandoning the land and the countryside, pushing people to migrate to cities to become wage workers and exploited laborers, and today no one plants or farms," she says.

After years of fighting to reclaim land unjustly grabbed by some companies, Laura now cultivates various types of corn, beans, squash, fava beans, and fruit plants on the ancestral land of her parents. This is exactly what the milpa is: the traditional method of cultivation of Mesoamerican farming families before colonization. "For me, agroecology means being free. Farming with what is around you means being independent from this agro-industrial system that enslaves and dictates what to eat. Farming and caring for the land is a form of resistance."

There is a thin thread that connects the mobilizations against seed and pesticide multinationals in Mexico to those for land in Palestine against Israeli colonialism. It is the struggle and resistance of indigenous peoples who have always lived in a symbiotic relationship with the land. In Mesoamerican or Mediterranean culture, or in all indigenous and farming communities that lived off subsistence economies, nature was not separated from human beings. They knew they were part of a whole, and all life revolved around natural resources. Certainly, there was shaping and transforming of the landscape, but "nature" was not turned into an external object to conquer, regulate, and exploit. Nature was not a passive substrate but the field in which all life unfolded.

From what Fernand Braudel called the long sixteenth century—the period when the regime of capitalist accumulation emerged, consolidated, and endured—the idea of nature began to be relegated to the outside, and the environment was seen as an infinite and free resource or as an equally infinite and free waste dump. Capitalism, in fact, transformed nature into an external object, so that the idea that nature could be conquered, occupied, and invaded became accepted and normalized.

Jason W. Moore writes in his book Capitalism in the Web of Life: “Capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime. Exploitation and the creation of value do not occur on nature but through it, within the socio-natural relations that emerge from the variable articulation of capital, power, and environment.”

In other words, capitalism is a way of organizing nature, and it is precisely the dominance of capital that has transformed nature into an "alien object" or "abstract nature," relying on a "vast repertoire of enclosures, fencing, and appropriation of the free goods of nature" to be used endlessly by capital, accumulating raw materials for free, and "serving the insatiable demand for cheap nature."

But this insatiable demand for cheap nature is now facing a major limit. Today, we are in a historical phase of capitalism's crisis because capitalism itself is based on the idea of infinite accumulation, endless growth, and unceasing appropriation of land. However, natural resources are finite and increasingly exhausted.

Faced with these limits, capitalism becomes even more aggressive. It therefore seeks to grab the last remaining resources: raw materials, lands, and nature. We have seen this in Central and South America, where indigenous communities and activists are increasingly attacked by multinationals and nation-states—the armed wing of capital—but also in Greenland, African states, and Palestine, where oil and gas companies, including Italy’s ENI, have obtained licenses from Israel's Ministry of Energy for gas exploration. The same script was written in Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, when oil companies secured contracts and licenses thanks to their countries' participation in the war against Iraq.

Thus, the care and defense of the land become central elements of resistance and radical revolution against capital. The farmers of Mexico know this well, as do those I have met over the years in Italy, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Palestine. Of course, some of the challenges faced by Palestinian farmers are unique to the form of Israeli colonialism, while others are shared by small farmers around the world, faced with climate change and the growing influence of industrialized agriculture.

But everyone knows that caring for the land, understanding limits, protecting biodiversity, and respecting the organic totality of life are revolutionary political practices of resistance.

Lina, my companion on this research journey with the Bertha Foundation, knows this well. She lives in the occupied Palestinian territories and, through the Palestinian Agroecological Forum, tries to promote community seed houses and agroecological practices. "Making our own food is a form of liberation," she told me in April 2024, when she came to Italy to meet other resistant farmers.

This piece is dedicated to her and to all the Palestinians, Lebanese, and others who resist by caring for the land.

With the support of the Bertha Foundation