With love for the vocation
The “agrarian question” has sparked countless debates in Latin America, and rightfully so. There is much to be said about the region that is now the world’s largest producer of food, supplying over a third of the food consumed by its primary trading partner, China. While it’s no surprise that we know very little about the perspectives of the key players — farmers, laborers, and peasants — it’s also controversial why technical experts contribute so little to public discourse and provide limited dissemination of knowledge about food systems and the cultivation of a national image associated with production.
In “The Art of Loving,” Erich Fromm described love as an art that is learned, much like painting a picture or mastering any other technique. This art requires both practice and theory. He spoke of the highest realization of human potential in the act of providing, which is to say, giving love. When I decided that understanding the fundamentals of providing food to my fellow beings would occupy the rest of my days, I had no idea that what I was essentially doing was committing to an act of love — no more, no less. I was far from anticipating the impact this would have on my worldview.
Fromm also described the sense of separateness that individualism instills in Western culture, leaving individuals vulnerable to the forces of nature. Those who view living from the relationship between humans and nature — namely, what the land produces — adopt a way of relating to work that counters the alienation often felt in urban settings, where people produce goods or services in a chain that may not feel entirely tangible. This separateness is a source of anguish, alienation, frustration, and depression. The joy of having a vocation devoid of such torment is immeasurable (without claiming that this relates directly to the level of sacrifice and suffering experienced by all types of rural workers).
Vocation has always been intertwined with spiritual notions that provide meaning, through which we seek salvation and give purpose to our role in the community. The spiritual connection to work has existed in humans long before capitalism. Weber argued that the Protestant ethic sought to use this spiritual connection to justify the accumulation of capital. Thus, the monetary and the ethical may blur for me.
The little girl who eagerly awaited science workshops, conducted experiments at home, and became obsessed with the shapes of tree canopies to the point of drawing them repeatedly on walls and furniture, who filled the house with plants or seeds everywhere and wanted to use them to end world hunger, could never have anticipated that the reality of her learning and journey would surpass any dream of fulfillment through her work. Understanding the importance of this vocation and its inherent responsibilities remains one of the main challenges.
I have no reservations in saying that food production is perhaps the highest form of provision. And under the premise that all wealth is generated through labor, primary wealth production is the result of the most formidable labor that can exist in society (the primary source of wealth according to Marx). It is no coincidence that this link in the production chain endlessly inspires tons of poetry, music, painting, and diverse forms of representation.
However, it is time to acknowledge that technical professionals in this field, especially agronomic engineers, maintain a profound silence when it comes to contributing to the agricultural awareness needed in our country. They confine themselves to participating in closed-end panels and circles, and as we know, in power disputes and discourse hegemony, empty spaces are always filled. I have grown weary of seeing panels, roundtables, and exhibitions on production and related topics that concern us, but with us absent. Often, professionals from related but not directly involved areas participate, or in the best and most fortunate cases, agronomic engineers specializing more in the social aspects than in the productive aspects. However, I have seen these production-focused technicians vent in various ways about how they suffer from the urban-rural discourse gap or lament prejudices and false accusations, but they rarely make organized efforts to overcome these barriers.
Although this is a phenomenon that extends to science in general. The education for which taxpayers have invested so much money does not solely belong to the individual trained in a public institution, especially if they join academia. We have a duty to contribute to the direction of institutions and public debate.
Mario Bunge specifically addressed the problem of the absence of scientists and technicians in development plans and how they — more than being excluded by bureaucracy or institutions — are voluntary omissions in their responsibility to inform, disseminate empirical knowledge to society at large, and form their own opinions.
It is essential to resist the temptation to import foreign models for sovereignty building. The Argentine philosopher mentioned that “development must be endogenous to be effective” and that “it is slower at the beginning, but the only one that suits us,” which is impossible to achieve without the direct involvement of those designing these solutions in the public and private sectors. Yet, technicians often hesitate to engage in politics, considering it banal, dirty, and subjective, as if the professional and academic world were free from such motivations.
While the importance of investing in and having scientists for national development is relatively consensual in much of society, and no one disputes the relevance of informed opinions, we encounter a paradox in a key sector like agriculture; what scientists and technicians in agricultural sciences do and think is practically a mystery in this country. This becomes a significant issue when we realize that it is perhaps the area of national development with the most recurrent controversies in the public agenda and indirectly generates a quarter of the national GDP — a fact known to all but crucial to ponder why opinions on agricultural development almost always come from those representing economic, political, or civil society interests, but rarely from the professionals working in the field.
When I refer to participation in public debate, I mean comprehensive involvement — not just “when they are called upon” or through praiseworthy and necessary initiatives of civil society, such as agroecology, environmental sustainability, or legislation. Professional associations and academia must be able to systematize their stance on issues, with empirical data on topics where public knowledge is lacking. For example, on subjects related to the link between production and drought, the use of genetically modified crops, agrochemicals, and many others.
The anglophile model has instilled the idea that food production is to blame for climate change. Faced with this, the country’s scientists and technicians, inheritors of Hernandarias’s legacy, have failed to defend to society the idea that our livestock plays an ecosystemic role with social and cultural importance that is essential for the mentioned endogenous development, to give an example. If Uruguayan society adopts this foreign analysis model and starts opposing production, we know that rural producers and workers will react negatively. But what will be the reaction of those studying their processes? If the answer is passivity, silence, and resignation, then the conflict may not be resolved in the best interest of the people.
I am deeply optimistic that collective political action to raise agricultural awareness will successfully take root in this country, consistent with efforts made by various parties from the past decade to the present. Along this path, there have been pioneers with awareness and a sense of vocation. These individuals transform the lives of their young colleagues, and I believe that with a little initiative, they could have an even greater impact on society at large. I recall one of my friends telling the teacher who most influenced us on our journey that “if it were up to him, he would dedicate an entire page of acknowledgments in his thesis,” and I deeply agreed, on the most human level. Or the organization of my classmates — collecting signatures not to demand anything for themselves but to ensure that future generations could continue to receive support from the most emblematic and distinguished professors in the field. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that several of the people I admire most in this world, for their tenacity, worldview, and sense of humor, are future colleagues.
For the love of vocation, we need to repay those who gave us the opportunity to learn, understanding what we do and why we do it. We have gained access to replicate and understand marvelous processes of nature that we must safeguard and disseminate. The world ahead of us is one where production systems will be pushed to the limit, not only in terms of resource demand (which could be catastrophic) but also in social and political terms. Perhaps we should consider our proactivity during this process.
Article in Spanish here
