Amaranth Development
Amaranth production with responsible management and marketing of amaranth in differentiated domestic and external markets, in order to ...
The countries of South America in general stand out for the production and export of raw materials, whether mineral, forestry, agricultural or hydrocarbon, which exerts enormous pressure on the land and the governments that must administer it. This is in parallel with major changes in the living and working conditions of rural populations, such as high human mobility, the extension and permanence of educational coverage, technological inclusion and services. At the same time, the aging of communities, the strategies of multi-economic activity, the feminization of agricultural work, the accentuation of violence in the demands for land and territory, the expansion of agricultural frontiers with agriculture for export, the advance of the use of agrochemicals, the concentration of markets and the decrease in the diversity of the diet, among other problems are linked to the rural area.
However, despite all these phenomena, accelerated and expansive, in general terms, the actions of NGOs, academia, news agendas, grassroots organizations and social and political leaders in the region hold and express a conservative view of the rural worlds; conservative because they go to trials that were valid at the time (twentieth century), but today have become prejudices; it is worth saying judgments that do not correspond to concrete contemporary realities, which are based on stereotypes instead of subjects and above all, based on outdated information, from a position that can only account for the fatality and not the vitality of the field.
ICCO and IPDRS propose a change of approach from a criterion that prioritizes the value of the field and its men and women, in a context in which humanity faces an uncontrollable accumulation of wealth and natural assets, including land, and substantial changes in the nature that shelters it.
In this scenario, the IPDRS is inserted, conceiving itself as a complementary facilitation institution to the available institutional structures, a second-floor space that allows articulating local and national initiatives and knowledge from a South American dimension, working in coordination with peasant men and women, indigenous, leaders, technicians, professionals, politicians, activists. The renewal of thought at the South American level can only be achieved in this way and that is why the IPDRS was born as a regional instance and with these characteristics in its intervention.