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Hometown: Quito, Ecuador
University: University of Buenos Aires
Award: Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health Graduate Training Award
Master’s Thesis Topic: Agricultural Practices and Food Security: A case Study of Strategies in the Central Andean Region of Argentina
Research location: Tudcum, Argentina

“My research helps to understand a particular place [in Argentina]. There must be a way to build policies that enable people in rural areas to work and have a better quality of life.” — Claudia Rivera

Claudia Rivera’s life has predisposed her to becoming involved in social issues. Her childhood was peopled with political refugees, Latin American intellectuals, and social activists. The family was exiled twice from Bolivia during dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. She herself was born in Colombia and has lived in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and the United States.

With such a background, it is not surprising to learn of her interest in the fundamental question of where a person’s next meal is coming from. “I’ve always been preoccupied with food provision, food distribution, and access,” Rivera says.

Food security in rural Argentina

Rivera was strangely fortunate when her family moved to Argentina during that country’s financial crisis in the early 2000s, because it gave her an opportunity to examine the issues of agriculture and food security against a background of severe economic hardship. She enrolled in the master’s program in Agriculture and Rural Development at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and for her thesis studied the social strategies used by rural people in marginal areas to secure food.

An IDRC Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health Graduate Training Award supported her field research in the small agricultural community of Tudcum, in Argentina’s central Andean region. Beginning in November 2005, Rivera spent seven months living with a farming family and working at many jobs.

“I did any job that allowed me to learn how people lived,” she says. She farmed, taught school, preserved fruit for the winter, and helped organize festivities. While inserting herself into Tudcum life, she interviewed many farmers and other residents. She also spoke with agricultural technicians, researchers working in the district, and representatives of public institutions.

The right to food

Rivera learned that problems with land ownership, access to water, education, and health care, technical know-how, and social support seriously limited development. She also learned that residents had devised a series of strategies to ensure individual and family survival. For instance, some families who produced excess food traded it for medical services. Farming families also bartered food among themselves to diversify their diet. Still others depended on government welfare programs to survive.

These observations on food security led Rivera to look more closely at issues of rights and sovereignty. “I began to view the situation from a human rights perspective,” she says. “The economic resources to buy food or the agricultural resources to produce it — access to land, water, markets, techniques, and fair trade — are two approaches that help to analyze the issue comprehensively.”

Her research provides a better understanding of the strategies that rural residents in marginal areas use to obtain food. It highlights important technical aspects, such as the need for soil testing, that will help to increase local food production. It also provides information about how beneficiaries use government social services.

Agriculture no panacea

For part of the Tudcum population, farming is an economic survival strategy. But Claudia Rivera’s main conclusion is that agriculture by itself will not help people in marginal rural areas to improve their livelihoods and thus ensure food security.

Adequate nutrition depends on the ability to form exchange networks, earn a salary, participate in state social programs, manage agricultural resources, such as the limited water supply in the area, or a combination of these strategies. This conclusion, she notes, shows the need to promote income-generating activities other than farming in areas such as Tudcum.

Claudia Rivera is now the vice rector of a technical high school run by the Yachana Foundation in the Ecuadorean Amazon, where she also teaches. The school is part of a sustainable agriculture project that includes ecotourism, vocational training, healthcare provision, microenterprises, and community banks providing microcredit. In fact, the project embodies the conclusions of Rivera’s thesis.

Debra Anthony, author of this profile, is a freelance writer in Mexico City.

Document(s) 8 of 9