Integrated Development Program
Vicente Guerrero
Mexico

Promoting Traditional Crops

EPIC's program partners in the Vicente Guerrero Development Program that are particularly effective in promoting the growing and eating of traditional food plants. These are well adapted to the local region and provide excellent nutritional benefits. Many of these traditional food plants grow easily, are very resilient, and are resistant to pests, thus eliminating the need for using pesticides.

Maintaining Biodiversity

In the Mesoamerican region, farmers domesticated corn and developed varieties that were finely tuned to local conditions. The Mexican state of Tlaxcala is a location that is particularly rich in the number of highly developed heritage corn varieties that have been grown here for several millenniums. The Vicente Guerrero Rural Development Program is working with the Tlaxcala State Legislature to ban genetically modified corn in the whole state. They worked for the passage of the Tlaxcala Legislature bill in 2009.

Each year in the month of March, the Vicente Guerrero Rural Development Program sponsors a popular Feria de Maiz -Corn Fair which attracts hundreds of people. The feria includes many events that promote these very special traditional varieties of corn, including contests that encourage their continued planting and the saving of seed for the next year's crop. Another program activity enables local farmers to produce large quantities of native corn seeds for community seed banks to be available to other farmers if they should have a crop failure and lose their seed.

Harvesting Water

The Vicente Guerrero Development Program and MCC-Mexico, two organizations with whom EPIC has been coordinating for many years, have been in the forefront of designing and promoting low cost ferro-cement cisterns. In much of Mexico and Central America there is a great need to harvest roof water and hold it for later use for the household, garden, or livestock.

In Nov. of 2005, EPIC sent Laureano Jacobo, director of La Semilla Training Center in Honduras, to Mexico to learn from the Vicente Guerrero Program how to build these cisterns. Laureano then worked on the adaptations necessary for building ferro-cement cisterns in the Honduran context, and he constructed a demonstration cistern at his training center to provide water for his livestock. Since then the La Semilla Center has been promoting ferro-cement cisterns with the many groups who come to the center for courses, and they have hosted several training courses on the construction of these cisterns.

In the last 10 years rains have become more erratic and draughts more frequent in Mexico and Central America. To adapt to these changing weather patterns, the Vicente Guerrero Development Program has been a leader in implementing new farming techniques, promoting crop diversification, and teaching the construction of low cost cisterns. Mexico and Central America have no federal disaster relief, and farmers must provide their own "crop insurance" to prepare for the extremes of nature already arriving with climate change.