Unlearning the green revolution: Inventory of agroecological practices in Ceará, Brazil, an instrument for decolonizing territory and (re)valuing peasant knowledge

Abstract

In this article we discuss the use of an inventory or mapping of agroecological practices, part of the “Peasant to Peasant” (PtP) methodology that is used to promote the territorialization of peasant agroecology, as a method for the epistemic decolonization of a territory. The so-called Green Revolution involved the imposition of exogenous technologies and knowledge, causing the fragmentation and devaluation of local peasant farming knowledge and practices adapted to local conditions, while locking farmers into external dependence. It was an epistemic colonization. The construction of an emancipatory horizontal process of peasant agroecology, on the other hand, necessarily requires “unlearning” that externally imposed exogenous knowledge. We use the case of the PtP process in the Santana Settlement, an agrarian reform community of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) in Ceará, Brazil, in order to demonstrate and analyze the inventory as a collective tool for decolonization.