Alexandro Silva Chaves

Alexandro Silva Chaves is demonstrating the social, environmental and economic viability of family-scale agriculture. He is consolidating agroecology farming methods and proving their economic viability in order to keep families on their land and increase their access to markets and lines of financing.

Alexandro is promoting the sustainability of family-farm production by proving that farmers can earn money both for their families as well as for the financing institutions. Through an innovative monitoring framework, Alexandro has been gathering data about the aggregate value of family farming to change the attitudes of those in financial institutions and help farmers gain access to loans for agricultural improvements and simple processing equipment that will make the farms even more productive. Alexandro is also using the indicators he has found in this process to develop a system that will allow consumers to distinguish agricultural products produced in an environmental, socially, and economically sustainable way. Beyond the label "organic," which is growing in popularity in Brazil, Alexandro's certification system is able to provide a much more comprehensive statement. In his local test markets, products with this label are already selling better. Alexandro has already started replicating his idea in different counties and plans on expanding nationally.

Family agriculture in Brazil is characterized as having low levels of environmental, social, and economic sustainability that is reflected in the precarious economic levels and social exclusion of most rural farming families. This is particularly true in the extreme southern region of Bahia state where the pattern of land occupation has degraded forests, water sources, and soils. As in many regions in Brazil, the first wave of occupation came in the form of wood and mineral exploration. After extracting the valuable wood, lumber companies moved on to new virgin regions, leaving many of the workers to settle and clear what was left of the forest for ranches and farms. Rich landlords seized large holdings in the most fertile regions, leaving the small families to farm the less productive land in the foothills and along the remaining patches of Atlantic Forest.
The result has been an ongoing struggle of family farmers to produce and compete against large agribusinesses who use mono-crop systems with expensive chemical inputs and sell their products in large quantities at cheap prices. The pressure on small farms to compete against their larger, more technologically advanced counterparts has led many to adopt aggressive farming practices that cause extensive deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion. Because of low production and high failure rates, 40 percent of young people in the region have migrated to urban centers. Community infrastructure has lost value and deteriorated. The vast majority of families yield an income below the minimum wage level.
The inability of small family farms to be competitive within this framework has led to a common perception within society and, particularly, within banks and financing agencies for agricultural production, that small family farms are either doomed to fail or, at best, maintain survival production rates that do not generate economic gains for society. In short, financing agencies see small family farms as a bad investment. This perception is reinforced by universities and research centers almost exclusively documenting and promoting the economic importance of mono-crop systems. Loan officers following this base of knowledge give priority to farmers producing under mono-crop systems–a practice that excludes small farmers, discourages environmental preservation and sustainability, and ultimately reinforces the instability of small family farms.
In recent years, initiatives like Terra Viva and Rural Workers Unions have begun to implement alternative agroecological farming methods that are more in line with the production reality of small family farms. They have been successful at improving environmental conditions and increasing production in a sustainable fashion. However, small producers continue to have difficulty accessing markets for their goods and lines of credit for increasing efficiency and production. The products generated through agroecological methods are not valued for their aggregate social, environmental, and economic value. Rural development agencies, financing institutions, and society in general have yet to recognize that family agroecological production contributes to the economic activity of the region and therefore is a good investment. The reason is simple: no one has shown them why.

To increase the viability and value of family agriculture, Alexandro's first job involved increasing production through agroecological methods. As a technical advisor and program coordinator for the organization Terra Viva, Alexandro participated in the implementation of agroecological systems on family farms across the region. His activities were based on the results of the diagnostic study including implementing agroforestry systems among family agriculturists with a fruit tree base to improve animal feed, increase soil, and preserve water resources. He is currently working with 120 families with an average of four members per family, or approximately 480 people total. Through these methods, he has been able to increase and diversify production and increase soil, forest, and water resources. As a result, the families have increased family income from the sale of products. Still, lack of markets and access to credit and infrastructure continue to diminish the impact of this agricultural improvement work.Alexandro, therefore, has decided to go beyond simply improving production through better agricultural techniques. He wants to increase the understanding of the value of these products–both with banks and with consumers by showing the economic, environmental, and social benefits of these family farms. He is designing a system for monitoring and quantifying the production of all the products and services provided by agroecological family agriculture, including human and natural resources being saved or used more efficiently. His approach is to formulate the study and train youth in the communities, the second generation of farmers, to conduct the study in teams. Besides quantifying the material, economic elements, this method shows the value of preserving agrobiodiversity. This monitoring involves, among other indicators, cataloging inputs and net and gross incomes for the families, evaluating increase in water resource recovery and subsequent lowering of investment risk due to drought, and evaluating the increase in property value of land with improved soil quality and tree coverage. Alexandro is currently working in three counties and plans to replicate the implementation of agroecology systems and monitoring in 28 counties serving as a model for other counties in the state and the country.
With the tabulation and dissemination of these results in meetings and documents, Alexandro is aiming to attack two major challenges facing small producers: commercializing their goods and gaining access to markets; and changing the attitudes and practices of loan officers and financial agencies to favor agroecological production over agribusiness. On the first front, Alexandro promotes the organization of family farmers. He begins by raising farmers' sensitivity to the collective problems they face. He then leads discussions with farmers to explore the process of commercializing their goods, giving special attention to the political structures in which family agriculture is situated. His goal is to create associations that will ensure the sustainability and replication of the methodology as well as aid in the process for commercializing goods collectively. Alexandro plans to combine this with the results of the study to create a certification method for products coming from agroecological family agriculture that disseminates the added social and environmental values of the products in terms that the consumer can understand. Once certified, these goods will be promoted in a unified economy, made possible through the mobilization of hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related businesses in this region with a high tourist economy.
On the second front, Alexandro will use the results that prove the economic contribution–in addition to the environmental and social impacts–to alter current rural development policies and finance practices. Building on the organizations of small producers, he will create mechanisms to prove to public agents, loan officers, and investors in the field of rural development and agricultural production that family agriculture can be a viable economic development strategy for agricultural regions, one preferred over environmentally destructive and unsustainable agri-business. He had envisioned and has already tested ways by which family farmers can improve their income by doing some basic processing locally, at their homes even, making products like jellies, jams, or frozen juices. The necessary processing equipment requires small loans that Alexandro is demonstrating can be profitable to the banks.

A farmer's son, Alexandro grew up in the south of Bahia. He worked in the fields alongside his relatives and was influenced by religious and labor leaders in the community who fought for equality and rights of rural families. At the age of 11, his father enrolled him in the Family Agriculture School in Itanhém. There, Alexandro came in contact with academic knowledge that had little connection with the challenging reality facing small farming families like his own. Nevertheless, the school alternated two weeks of learning in the classroom with two weeks of "rest" in order to "try out" these traditional techniques. It was during these periods when Alexandro began to test and innovate ways to improve the forms of cultivation he grew up with.
In 1992 Alexandro began a university course in agriculture technology and expanded his conceptual knowledge of family and large-scale farming in Brazil. He was able to broaden this knowledge through practical internships with organizations developing work in social inclusion for farming families. He became aware of the technical and social-political challenges permeating agriculture, farmers, and their environment and became more and more interested in how family agriculture was inserted into commercial markets. After completing college, Alexandro returned to his hometown and interned at Terra Viva Center for Agro-Ecological Development that had partnered with the Rural Workers Union of Itanhém and the Association of Small Rural Producers of Itanhém. There, he had the opportunity to participate in carrying out a study called Rapid and Participative Diagnostic of Agroecosystems in three communities and assisted in systematizing the results to return the information to the community.
At 21, he was elected as one of the secretaries of the Rural Workers Union of Itanhém and worked as a technical advisor for Terra Viva to manage activities in his hometown and surrounding communities. His work included implementing sustainable agroecological systems, institutional building for small producers' organizations, representing the organization with public agencies and developing project proposals to develop new activities. After 2000 Alexandro began dedicating himself full-time to his work with Terra Viva, monitoring the impact of the programs. He used his role to represent the organization in regional and national forums to negotiate with investors and demonstrate the economic viability of agroecological systems with the aim of forming concrete proposals for changing political, environmental, and agricultural policies.