First Person

Esperanza Hernandez prior to delivering her presentation at Texas A&M's 2008 AgriLife Conference in College Station, TX.

Photographer: Borlaug Institute Johanna Roman

From the bottom of my heart, and the hearts of the thousands of Guatemalan farmers you have helped and will continue to help, I want to thank Texas A&M and USDA for giving us hope for a better future.

Good Morning My name is Esperanza Hernandez. Esperanza is the Spanish word for “hope” and today I am going to talk about how Texas A&M brought hope back into my life.

I am a leader from the IJATZ Cooperative in the community of San Lucas Toliman in Guatemala. IJATZ means “seed” in kakchiquel, a Mayan language, and is symbolic of life and generation.

I belong to the Maya ethnic group called “the Tzutujil.” The Mayas have always lived in extreme poverty.

Poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy characterize a great part of the Guatemalan indigenous population. Where I live, poverty and food insecurity affect everyone, babies, kids, adults and seniors.

Health problems, especially those related to inadequate nutrition, affect everyone in my community.

In my coop, we make a modest living thanks to mother earth. We have very small farms, of one or two acres in size. We have always been farmers and worked the land, but we lack capital and technological assistance, and we do not have the means to invest and renovate our permanent crops.

We produce ecologic coffee, but we also practice subsistence farming of corn and beans.

We live in a disaster-prone area surrounding Lake Atitlan. And while the lake might be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world because it is surrounded by majestic volcanoes, those volcanoes also present a threat to us.

Texas A&M chose to work with us because at IJATZ we are dedicated to protect our ecosystem and we have the desire to promote training programs to then be able to establish small agribusinesses.

We feel blessed to be beneficiaries of Texas A&M’s Food for Progress project, particularly because we have been through very difficult times. For decades, we have endured social, economic and even environmental upheaval.

Guatemala suffered more than 36 years of internal conflict, which formally ended with the signing of the Peace Accords at the end of 1996. Most members of IJATZ are orphans from the war.

And while our civil war is over, there are still enormous problems with poverty, especially in the rural areas where we, the Mayan farmers, live.

Even nature, which farmers rely on for their survival, has caused us serious difficulties. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, a deadly and powerful hurricane, devastated our region.

And more recently, in 2005, Tropical Storm Stan left us in critical condition. Landslides and mudslides destroyed our bridges, roads, and homes -- and took the lives of many of our family members.

The situation was truly desperate. Roads and highways were washed out, bridges collapsed by overflowing rivers, and scores of communities in the highlands were cut off from the capital or other cities, with no communication, food or water.

We lost our houses, schools, clinics and plantations. But we felt we were the lucky ones. Some of our neighboring communities like Panabaj were completely gone, buried in mudslides. Thousands of people drowned.

Though WE survived, our crops were destroyed, and we were left with nothing with which to make a living. Then, in 2006, Representatives from the Borlaug Institute, Mr. Keith Cole and Ms. Johanna Roman, came to our community with the local project coordinator, Ms. Maria Ester Bucaro, and offered to help us.

We were grateful that God had heard our prayers and our hearts were filled with joy when we learned that the United States government had funded a project in Guatemala that could help us improve our critical situation.

Texas A&M gave us hope. Through the Food for Progress project, Texas A&M students worked with our coffee growers to develop a business plan to help us sell our coffee without the use of brokers. We are now exporting our coffee. Students also offered training programs on soil management, crop diversification and budgeting. We learned how to use calculators for the first time.

Then Texas A&M established a composting unit in our coop and we are now using coffee pulp, plus a vine that grows as a weed in Lake Atitlan as raw materials to produce compost that we are using in our organic coffee and vegetable plots.

Now we are also bagging the compost and selling it to neighboring communities, allowing us to earn income. Texas A&M bought us the equipment, provided training, developed our compost formulas and taught us how to establish our small agribusiness.

We are already seeing positive results. It is important to note that in the truly “rural” areas of Guatemala where there are no commercial operations, people have to survive with less than an average of two dollars per day.

Before the Borlaug project, small coffee growers made less than $1 per day growing coffee, which is very sensitive to the market. Sometimes they did not even make a profit and in many cases, they did not even recover their investment.

Now, with our compost unit, we will be able to make about $2 per day. And now Texas A&M is transforming our simple kitchen into a food-processing center where we can preserve our crops and start a canning business. A Texas A&M student and several local food processing experts taught our women how to process fruits and vegetables. Before, we did not know how to add value to them. We have learned how to prepare pickled vegetables, jellies, ice-creams, soy products and salsas.

This center will allow us to help about 700 people so they can meet their most basic needs. We have 114 members at IJATZ and the average number of family members is 6.

We know that Texas A&M experts will continue visiting us to train us, help us improve our yields and sell our products. This will change the lives of our small farming community, especially the lives of many of the women who were unemployed and now will be able to help their families.

But we have not been the only ones blessed through this project. My neighbors in other Mayan villages have received greenhouses, irrigation systems, seeds, fertilizers and supplies to grow fruits, vegetables, ornamental plants and flowers.

In a community close to mine, there is a farmers association called The Poor Women of Palestina. They were abandoned by their husbands because they migrated here to the United States. These women were left alone with hundreds of small kids. They don’t even know if their husbands were captured, are alive, or if they simply chose to forget about them.

Texas A&M also provided training and now they are processing products and selling them to sustain their kids. Furthermore, Texas A&M is supporting two training centers for farmers in other communities, besides the training center at IJATZ.

They are offering a series of “train-the-trainer” courses for community leaders who will then transfer this knowledge to hundreds of people in their villages.

For example, Texas A&M faculty members have already delivered courses on leadership development, agricultural techniques, and exporting. Sometimes they have used up to 3 translators since we have different Mayan dialects.

My repatriate neighbors from the South Coast, including farmers who moved back to Guatemala after the Civil War ended, are also being helped by the project.

Texas A&M experts have taught them how to manage their watersheds, and are now teaching them how to grow bioenergy crops and process biodiesel. Some farmers have even learned how to process tropical fruits to produce juice, snow-cones and prepare new products such as smoothies and dehydrated fruits.

From the bottom of my heart, and the hearts of the thousands of Guatemalan farmers you have helped and will continue to help, I want to thank Texas A&M and USDA for giving us hope for a better future.

You are very generous. I was pleased to have had the opportunity to tell former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Mike Johanns how generous you are during a meeting with him in Guatemala City which I and other farmers from my region attended.

I told him that Texas A&M is making a big difference in our lives and the lives of our children, and he really liked hearing that. Again, I thank you for the work you are doing in my country – and for the work you are doing in other countries to help people have better lives -- and to have “esperanza” (hope) for the future.