After pandemic, agricultural education makes a comeback in Guna Yala

By Ariana Bennett

GAN IGAR, Guna Yala— Igua Castillo’s food grows an hour away. He travels, on foot, carrying supplies on his back, to and from his land.

The path into the Gan Igar community, formerly known as Cangandi, has been used by indigenous people like Castillo, 38, for hundreds of years. It exists at the narrowest point on the Panamanian isthmus and is littered with debris from an abandoned U.S. military base there, established during World War II. The surrounding lands are largely “secondary forest,” reflecting recent regrowth characterized by dense underbrush and few tall trees.

Castillo’s land is one of many plots surrounding the community, all owned by different families. He walks to his every few days, harvesting what he and his family will need for meals. 

These areas look like sparse patches of forest, but in reality, yucca, banana, plantains and sugarcane are all growing there. Guna Yala’s traditional agroforestry practice is called “nainu.” On the steep hillsides of the mainland, farmers grow base crops such as bananas and plantains for two to three years after which perennials—cacao, fruit trees such as avocado and medicinal plants—are grown for 20 years or more. In the fertile coastal regions or lowlands, the parcels are more stable. Crops, instead of plots, are rotated. In these regions, cultivation systems integrate both crops and trees. On the islands, coconuts are grown.

“Nainu is an ancestral tradition, whereas the other agroforestry projects based on Western knowledge are all being reevaluated in comparison with the traditional practices,” said Geodisio Castillo, a researcher at Centro de Desarrollo Ambiental y Humano (CENDAH) with no relation to Igua.

Knowledge of these traditional planting methods was passed from generation to generation in Guna Yala. That, however, is changing. “So the way I grew up is good, but my kids are in school now learning another language, other traditions,” Castillo lamented about his three daughters and two sons. “They only want to go to the school,” he continued. “Because they are in school they are not spending as much time learning about the rainforest and agriculture.” 

As is the case with Castillo and his children, traditional agricultural methods have been increasingly disrupted or even discontinued as many within the comarca have relocated to Panama City for education and employment. This migration is common for the people of Guna Yala, known in Panama as a comarca, a region governed self-autonomously by indigenous peoples. It stretches 232 miles along the Caribbean north coast of Panama, sharing an eastern border with Colombia. There are 51 total communities living in the comarca, 40 spread among 365 islands and 11 on the mainland.

In recent decades, tourism – mostly to pristine, uninhabited islands characterized by white sand, palm trees and crystal clear water – exploded in the territory, affording the community the money it needed to buy supplies and food. That income, however, evaporated in the pandemic. Moreover, many families affected by job loss and, as a result, loss of housing, returned to their indigenous lands for support.

“They lost their jobs,” Lenín Alfonso Morales, an environmental engineer who has conducted research in the comarca, said. “They can’t really pay their rent, needed to come back to Guna Yala, and the communities opened the door for people then to come back to the islands.”

It soon became clear that food was in short supply, and the people of Guna Yala needed to return to traditional, subsistence agriculture. But could they?

Historically, “the idea was to integrate the indigenous people into the nation, the nation state, in this case Panama, with the idea that they should forget to do what they normally did in their daily lives,” said Artinelio Hernández, director of the Centro de Investigación sobre Educación en los Pueblos Indígenas at the University of the Americas. “Suddenly, practically, the generation was forgetting the importance of agriculture, which is also a way of life, and there was no content to teach the children about the subject of agriculture.”

Today, as a result, agricultural revival efforts are underway. In addition, after approval from the Ministry of Education, a revised curriculum is set to launch in Guna schools that seeks to preserve both the Guna language and culture and introduce agricultural methods as early as grade four. 

The knowledge of the earth is contained in the native gunadule language, Hernandez explained. “The language is the one that carries these contents to understand the theme of the community environment, the environment.” The program has been implemented by 15 to 17 of 44 schools in Guna Yala.

The hope is that returning these skills to new generations would prevent future food deficits. “[The government] were to, above all, expel the large indigenous population…to the cities,” Hernandez said. “The idea now is to reverse that situation with this educational model.”

Changes under foot

The Guna General Congress is divided in two: the cultural side and administrative side. At the Administration Congress’ recent June meetings, agriculture was not discussed. “The general topic of agriculture is taken as a last consideration,” Geodisio Castillo explained through an interpreter. It should, however, be at the forefront, he said, as the Guna people’s interaction with food production is critical to their cultural survival. 

Rosby Valez Sam, 49, had been living in Panama City for 20 years until the pandemic moved his family, four sons and one daughter, back to Gan Igar. His kids, he said, knew nothing about the land. He taught them “everything. How you cut a tree. How you hold a machete. How you have to farm,” he said through an interpreter. He remembers his father’s stories of surplus, of refusing imported Colombian sugar because the comarca grew its own sugarcane. “If you don’t work,” he said, “what are you going to eat?”

It wasn’t just Sam’s family. “The majority of [those who returned] didn’t know anything about the farm, about the sowing,” Morales explained. Food mentality has changed significantly. “We are eating more, more, more canned foods.”

According to researcher Castillo, by 2020, 60% to 70% of food was imported into the comarca from Panama.

That shifted significantly over the last two years. “I would say 80 percent of the banana crop was coming from our territory,” Castillo said. “But now that the pandemic is winding down, I think we will start losing that production again.”

Hernández also noted the shift toward self-sufficiency during the pandemic, pointing to a movement within Guna Yala to develop more of the community’s food supply. “Food security does not come as a program from outside, but [community members] are understanding that they need to produce their products for a healthier diet, internally,” Hernández said through a translator.

Modernity is only one factor affecting Guna agriculture. There are others, researcher Castillo said, for example, the comarca, struggles with the introduction of genetically modified seeds by the Ministry of Agricultural Development (MIDA) projects. “Because of the introduction of this Western technology, of the seeds, it’s causing us Guna to consume less of our native seeds.” Native seeds are not being lost, he said, they are simply not being used or consumed. With no official monitoring systems in place, humans become the birds and the bats of the rainforest as crops shared around the community propagate genetically modified foods across the comarca, he added.

Where there are no fences

Four striped hammocks hang loosely from wooden beams, signifying the four sailas, or chiefs, of the Gan Igar community. Emelio Valdez, clad in a light blue dress shirt with a wide collar, navy tie and black fedora hat, sits upright on one, with a leg dangling on either side. Despite their title, the sailas are no exception to working the fields. Their job, also, is to push community members to work harder in the summer, when agricultural work is at its most difficult. Familial plots are sometimes divided by trees; there are no fences.

As saila, Valdez is the community’s advisor and uses the role to encourage families to continue to work the land, as their ancestors did, keeping the culture alive. He, like Morales and Hernández, is preoccupied with the future of cultivation in the comarca. “They are dedicating themselves to other activities that have entered the region, for example tourism, and among these tourism activities there are other illicit activities that have entered the communities,” Hernández said.

In the city, where about 25,000 Gunas live, according to Hernández, the Guna population is organized into multiple communities such as dance groups, that promote cultural retention. Young people also use social media to transmit knowledge of the Guna community for others to see and understand. “All is not lost,” Hernández  said. “We are using these technologies to recover our memory, our identity, our way of speaking, in the midst of all these contradictions that exist in our society.”

That recovery is evident in Deliano Davies, 41, who serves as an emblem of connecting what was to what is. On a recent sunny June morning, he sits outside the Guna Museum on the island of Carti Sugdub, which lies in the Gulf of Guna Yala, one of the easternmost islands that make up the Guna Yala territory. His land lies on the mainland, a 20-minute canoe ride away. Every week, he travels to Panama City to bring his family food he’s grown. “I love,” he said. “It’s my family.”

The museum is an open space but shade is provided by a blue tarp propped up by a makeshift wooden post. Davies is framed by the bold yellow, green and red stripes of the Guna Yala flag. Behind him lies a miniature wooden canoe. When someone in the community dies, one just like it is placed in the water, meant for the journey to the afterlife. A little wooden spear accompanies the canoe, in case the soul gets hungry along the way.