Jairo Restrepo is an activist in the field of sustainable
agriculture and food sovereignty. He campaigns for a return of
self-determination, knowledge and autonomy for the farmer in the face of
powerful agribusiness. He has been a consultant on sustainable agriculture for
many years, working with the UN, Unesco, the FAO and the International Labour
Organisation. He worked at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul in
Brazil for many years.
In an interview he explains:
“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.
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.”
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