Hugo Medina Huerta

Hugo Medina, a doctor by training, has created a cooperative food resource fund that promotes land conservation and sustainable economic development, while reinforcing local values in the indigenous Guaraní community of Paraguay.

Hugo asserts that social and economic development projects fail to improve the poor conditions in indigenous communities because they often undermine basic tenets of local culture. He has worked with the Paí-Tavyterá ethnic group in the Guaraní community of Paraguay since deforestation and destruction of native habitats began to threaten its very existence. By recovering traditional Guaraní systems of reciprocity, Hugo developed a new economic model that helps change the local mode of production without changing the way of life. He addressed the issue directly, noting that many potentially beneficial, resource-generating activities had become environmentally, socially, and economically harmful enterprises in the hands of large companies and farms. Typically associated with ecological destruction and business monopolization, cattle-raising emerged as a practice worthy of reform in line with indigenous values.
According to Hugo's food resource fund model, cattle are "banked" in a community fund from which families borrow and repay with units of livestock. The community develops its own infrastructure for the project and collectively monitors consumption to avoid land damage and overgrazing. Similar to the principles behind village banking, the cow banks represent a way to maximize efficiency, production, and output through shared responsibility and communal benefit. Although the banks deal in strictly nonfinancial terms, the cow "savings" model trains its participants to consider the value of local commodities, a concept that Hugo helps translate into market rhetoric. In his highly objective and replicable model, Hugo has successfully applied traditional values of cooperation to a modern community-banking format and has facilitated investment from local people in order to preserve native lands and promote sustainable development.

According to Paraguay's most recent census, indigenous people number about 100,000, though this figure fails to account for the ethnically indigenous people who have migrated from native lands to cities or assimilated into the dominant white culture. Like many of their counterparts in the Americas, Paraguayan indigenous peoples have been victims of massacre, have been driven from their homes by environmental destruction, and have coped with poverty since the time of colonization. The Guaraní is the largest of the country's 12 ethnic groups and can be divided into smaller subgroups, of which the Paí-Tavyterá is the largest, numbering about 20,000 people at Paraguay's eastern border with Brazil. They constitute about 25 percent of the population in the state of Amambay and 20 percent of the country's total indigenous population. In Brazil, the Paí-Tavyterá are called Kaiova and have a population estimated at 15,000.
The Paí-Tavyterá are recognized for their knowledge of social, economic, and political management. However, without land titles–a foreign concept their livelihood are compromised. They have been forced to live on small, degraded portions of the land, insufficient for continuing their way of life. Unable to sustain themselves through traditional hunting, gathering, and subsistence agriculture, the Paí-Tavyterá's general nutrition and health have declined and most social structures have broken down. As a result of having been driven from their homelands by corporate agriculture, the Paí-Tavyterá lacked reliable sources of protein and calcium. Many community members left their homes to seek jobs at the ranches and large farms that have taken over the region. Others migrated to cities and succumbed to the pressures of a consumer society foreign to their people, resulting in high rates of alcoholism and family abandonment. Moreover, corporate ranchers continue to expand the already overgrown grasslands, causing forest fires that now threaten even the small remaining portion of original Paí-Tavyterá territory in the Guaraní region.
Although various citizen sector organizations, government agencies, and local community leaders have worked to preserve the dignity of Guaraní lands and their inhabitants, culminating in the 1981 Statute of Indigenous Communities and the 1992 Amendments to the Constitution of Paraguay, most economic development efforts have failed. Because most attempts to modernize production methods contradict traditional values or disrupt community social organization, the Paí-Tavyterá continue to fall victim to poverty, environmental ruin, and cultural degradation. As a result of increasing mistrust of methods and people from the developed world, indigenous groups of the Guaraní deny themselves the knowledge, the technology, and the infrastructure necessary to sustain their lifestyle and customs.

Hugo, who has gained credibility among the Paí-Tavyterá after providing years of health and land entitlement services, works with local families to fight food insecurity in the Guaraní region. He developed a new method of cattle-raising to address both the local food shortage issue and the common problem of land degradation caused by overgrazing. Unlike previous efforts, Hugo's approach de-emphasizes market penetration and recognizes the indigenous culture's rejection of currency. He adapted the village-banking model that has found success in other, less traditional Latin American communities to reflect the local value of cows as a major food resource. Cattle resources are banked in a fund and monitored collectively by members of the community. Families borrow and repay units of livestock, whose yield of meat, milk, and skins contributes to the wealth of the community as a whole. Instead of causing environmental damage, community-based cattle-raising preserves resources, promotes responsible land use, and contributes to overall sustainability. Hugo also trains one newlywed couple per clan in animal husbandry, a science that may be passed down to future generations to maintain local knowledge and further promote the incorporation of contemporary methods.
Instead of competition, Hugo's model requires collective commitment as each family pays its bank debt by presenting another family with a young cow. Economic development is based on communal equality because no individual may borrow more cattle than any other and the benefits of each investment are shared by the whole community. Physical infrastructure development–corrals, fences, sheds–takes advantage of accessible structures without destroying areas of cultivation, water systems, or other valuable resources. Moreover, Hugo has built upon the Paí-Tavyterá's existing relationships with nearby communities to facilitate more organized resource exchange and potentially to implement additional livestock banks.
Hugo originally launched the pilot cattle-banking project in 1990 in Guaraní's Cerro Akangüe minicommunity. Thirty-five of the first 55 participating families received cows acquired through project fundraising and donations from nearby ranches. The remaining 20 families received their first loans over the next two years from cows added to the rotating fund. After four years, the first two generations of cows had reached full maturity, all loans had been repaid, and the rotating fund had already accumulated enough livestock to maintain sustainable lending activities for years to come. After reaching sustainability, the cattle bank donates its first generation of mature cows to a nearby community in which Hugo plans to implement the program. As a result, the program currently involves seven communities at various stages of implementation and benefits more than 300 families.
In addition to planning for resource rollover, Hugo works with local leaders in each new expansion community to conduct a feasibility study, followed by diagnostic evaluations of available resources, structural capacity, and environmental limitations. Each community must demonstrate a collective commitment to the program and a sufficient level of social organization. He visits each proposed site's general assembly to present his project, and once it is approved, he visits each household to get a better understanding of community-specific values, beliefs, problems, and objectives. Representatives from communities in which banking systems have already been established become the primary source of information for new projects and are responsible for most of the transfer of technical knowledge, including record-keeping, meeting facilitation, and veterinary services. Hugo is now leveraging the administrative costs of expanding the cattle-banking initiative to more distant communities by conserving supplies for reuse and presenting his ideas to private and public funders around the region.
Building upon their successes over the past decade, Hugo and the Guaraní communities have modified the cattle-banking model to plan and launch collective agriculture, horticulture, fruit cultivation, fishing, apiculture, and water conservation projects. Moreover, the communities are developing plans to adapt some of the conservation projects as ecotourism enterprises, drawing on the richness of the Paí-Tavyterá culture to secure the resources necessary to support more extensive preservation initiatives.
The impacts of Hugo's sustainable development initiatives transcend the long-term environmental and economic benefits for which they were designed. Measurable health and social indicators prove the added short-term value of increased milk and meat consumption and community participation. Between 1990 and 2000, the infant mortality rate dropped 30 percent, from nine to six deaths per 1,000 births. The overall life expectancy rate increased from 48 to 52 years. The collective nature of Hugo's program and the community monitoring component have led to significant reductions in family abandonment, sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and drug abuse; they have promoted better childcare and higher school-attendance rates. Instances of alcoholism among community members between the ages of 15 and 45 also decreased from 9 to 4 percent. Moreover, the emphasis Hugo places on group discussion and holistic solution design makes sustainability, whether social, economic, environmental, or health focused, more likely.
Having proven the validity of his new idea and its relevance as a social innovation, Hugo has begun to market it to representatives of indigenous groups and other rural populations in Paraguay and abroad. The Agency of Indigenous Affairs has already invited Hugo to present his idea as a possible solution to some of the problems faced by indigenous groups in Brazil. Hugo is ready to continue developing his idea as a tool to preserve indigenous cultures throughout South America and around the world.

Hugo Medina grew up in Asunción in the eastern Paraguayan state of Amambay. His father was the community's first doctor and the first person to introduce Western medicine to the Paí-Tavyterá people in the 1950s. He overcame their initial resistance and gained local people's respect by inserting himself into the community and adopting certain aspects of the local culture. Although Hugo's parents divorced when he was young and he lived with his mother, he was greatly influenced by his father's work with the Paí-Tavyterá and visited often. He eventually followed his father's example to study medicine, specializing in surgery and earning a degree in public health.
In 1975 Hugo joined a group of anthropologists as a health worker for Project Paí-Tavyterá. At that point, Paraguay's government did not yet recognize the rights of indigenous groups, and the growth of private landowners and industries threatened to eradicate the people of the Guaraní community altogether. Based on this experience and the threats to indigenous people's survival, Hugo dedicated his life to help the Paí-Tavyterá gain land entitlement and preserve their way of life. As a result of his efforts, 80 percent of the communities with whom he worked now hold the title to their land.
For the past 10 years, Hugo has worked with the members of the Guaraní community to develop and spread a new model for raising livestock and preserving native lands. All aspects of his program are designed to work in harmony with the local Paí-Tavyterá culture. It is this understanding that has helped him successfully adapt contemporary production and development models as tools to preserve traditional ways of life where others have failed. Hugo's cattle fund innovation represents not only a major breakthrough for the indigenous people of Paraguay, but also a social enterprise that can be applied to communities throughout the developing world.